y comfortable or even
tolerable. One hears sometimes of men callously disappearing--deserting
their wives for a period, and going off, as if for peace, to distant
parts wherever there is work to be picked up. One man, I remember, was
reported to have said, when he ultimately reappeared, that he had gone
away because "he thought it would do his wife good." Another, who had
openly quarrelled with his wife and departed, was discovered months
afterwards working in a Sussex harvest-field. He came back by-and-by,
and now for years the couple have been living together, not without
occasional brawls, it's true, but in the main good comrades, certainly
helpful to one another, and very fond of their two or three children. A
bad case was that of a bullying railway navvy, who, having knocked his
wife about and upset his old father, went off ostensibly to work. In
reality he made his way by train to a town some ten miles distant, and
from there, in a drunken frolic, sent a telegram home to his wife
announcing that he was dead. He had given no particulars: a long search
for him followed, and he was found some days later in a public-house of
that town vaingloriously drinking. I remember that Bettesworth, who told
me this tale, was full of indignation. "Shouldn't you think he could be
punished for that?" he asked. "There, if I had my way he should have
twelve months reg'lar _hard labour_, and see if that wouldn't dummer a
little sense into 'n." There was no suggestion, however, of "a woman in
the case," to explain this man's ill-treatment of his wife; it appears
to have been simply a piece of freakish brutality.

When disagreements occur, it is likely that the men are oftener to blame
than their wives. Too often I have seen some woman or other of the
village getting her drunken and abusive husband home, and never once
have I seen it the other way about. Nevertheless, in some luckless
households the faults are on the woman's side, and it is the man who has
the heartache. I knew one man--a most steady and industrious fellow, in
constant work which kept him from home all day--whose wife became a sort
of parasite on him in the interest of her own thriftless relatives. In
his absence her brothers and sisters were at his table eating at his
expense; food and coals bought with his earnings found their way to her
mother's cottage; in short, he had "married the family," as they say. He
knew it, too. In its trumpery way the affair was an open sca