nes are very fond of it.

As soon as ever the child is old enough to crawl about, it is sure to
get out into the road and roll in the dust. It is a curious fact that
the agricultural children, with every advantage of green fields and wide
open downs, always choose the dusty hard road to play in. They are free
to wander as they list over mead and leaze, and pluck the flowers out of
the hedges, and idle by the brooks, all the year round, the latter part
of the spring, when the grass is nearly fit for mowing, only excepted.
Yet, excepting a few of the elder boys birdnesting, it is the rarest
thing to meet a troop of children in the fields; but there they are in
the road, the younger ones sprawling in the dust, their naked limbs
kicking it up in clouds, and the bigger boys clambering about in the
hedge-mound bounding the road, making gaps, splashing in the dirty water
of the ditches. Hardy young dogs one and all. Their food is of the
rudest and scantiest, chiefly weak tea, without milk, sweetened with
moist sugar, and hunches of dry bread, sometimes with a little lard, or,
for a treat, with treacle. Butter is scarcely ever used in the
agricultural labourer's cottage. It is too dear by far, and if he does
buy fats, he believes in the fats expressed from meats, and prefers lard
or dripping. Children are frequently fed with bread and cheap sugar
spread on it. This is much cheaper than butter. Sometimes they get a bit
of cheese or bacon, but not often, and a good deal of strong cabbage,
soddened with pot-liquor. The elder boys get a little beer; the young
girls none, save perhaps a sip from their mother's pint, in summer. This
is what they have to build up a frame on capable of sustaining heat and
cold, exposure, and a life of endless labour. The boys it seems to suit,
for they are generally tolerably plump, though always very short for
their age. Frequently teams of powerful horses drawing immense loads of
hay or straw may be seen on the highway, in the charge of a boy who does
not look ten years old judged by the town standard, but who is really
fifteen. These short, broad, stout lads, look able to stand anything,
and in point of fact do stand it, from the kick of a carter's heavy boot
to the long and bitter winter. If it is wished to breed up a race of men
literally "hard as nails," no better process could be devised; but,
looked at from a mental and moral point of view, there may be a
difference of opinion.

The girls do n