ral inclination towards the pretty and romantic inherent in the
sex. In the spring she makes daisy chains, and winds them round the
baby's neck; or with the stalks of the dandelion makes a chain several
feet in length. She plucks great bunches of the beautiful bluebell, and
of the purple orchis of the meadow; gathers heaps of the cowslip, and
after playing with them a little while, they are left to wither in the
dust by the roadside, while she is sent two or three miles with her
father's dinner. She chants snatches of rural songs, and sometimes three
or four together, joining hands, dance slowly round and round, singing
slowly rude rhymes describing marriage--and not over decent some of
these rhymes are. She has no toys--not one in twenty such girls ever
have a doll; or, if they do, it is but some stick dressed in a rag. Poor
things! they need no artificial dolls; so soon as ever they can lift
it, they are trusted with the real baby. Her parents probably do not
mean to be unkind, and use makes this treatment bearable, but to an
outsider it seems unnecessarily rough, and even brutal. Her mother
shouts at her in a shrill treble perpetually; her father enforces his
orders with a harsh oath and a slap.

The pressure of hard circumstances, the endless battle with poverty,
render men and women both callous to others' feelings, and particularly
strict to those over whom they possess unlimited authority. But the
labourer must not be judged too harshly: there is a scale in these
matters; a proportion as in everything else; an oath from him, and even
a slap on the ear, is really the counterpart of the frown and emphasised
words of a father in a more fortunate class of life; and the children do
not feel it, or think it exceptionally cruel, as the children of a
richer man would. Undoubtedly, however, it does lessen the bond between
child and parent. There is little filial affection among these
cottagers--how should there be? The boy is driven away from home as
early as possible; the girl is made day by day to feel her fault in
being a girl; to neither can the poor man give any small present, or any
occasional treat. What love there is lasts longest between the mother
and her daughter. The only way in which a labourer exhibits his
affection is when another labourer in authority, as a carter, ill-treats
his boy--a too common case--and then he speaks loudly, and very
properly. But even in most serious matters there is a strange
callou