d be built on a tract of less than four acres of land,
and that only one family was to live in each cottage. Feather pillows
and beds took the place of straw pallets with a log of wood for a
headrest. The poorer homes, which could not afford expensive rugs,
were still strewn with sweet herbs, which, however, were renewed and
kept fresh, and the bedchambers were made fragrant with flowers. The
economy of the kitchen was not the hard problem it had formerly been,
for in the time of Elizabeth, the period of which we are speaking,
the laboring classes could obtain meat in abundance. The "gentry ate
wheaten, and the poor barley bread; beer was mostly brewed at home;
wine was drunk in the richer houses. Trade brought many luxuries to
the English table; spices, sugar, currants, almonds, dates, etc.,
came from the East." Indeed, so many currants were imported into the
country that it is said that the people of the places from whence they
were shipped supposed that they were used for the extraction of dye
or else were fed to the hogs; but the real explanation was the great
fondness of the English people for currants and raisins in their
pastry. While they were not gluttonous, the English then, as now, were
fond of the table, and gave much attention to eating and drinking.

The old people of the age regretfully looked back over their lives
to former days, when, as they said, although the houses were but of
willow, Englishmen were oaken, but now the houses were oaken and the
Englishmen of straw. The appearance of chimneys was not greeted as
an improvement, for the poor had never fared so well as in the smoky
halls of other days; they could not bear the thought that their
windows, which were formerly of wickerwork, were now of glass, or that
now, instead of sweet rushes, foreign carpets were upon the floors
of many houses; or that so many houses were being built of brick and
stone, plastered inside. It was regarded as a sure indication of
a decline in virility that the sons of the sturdy yeomen of a past
generation should crave comfortable beds hung with tapestry, and use
pillows--luxuries which once were thought suited only for women in
childbed. In the midst of an influx of new comforts, there was a
barrenness of things considered to-day to be essential, and the
absence of which was made the more glaring by reason of the many
comforts and luxuries with which life was surrounded. "Good soap was
an almost impossible luxury, and the