farmhouse for three or
four generations, and are at last sold because the final representative
of the family is imbued with modern ideas, and quits farming for trade.
The cottagers always attend sales like this, and occasionally get hold
of good bargains, and so it is that really good substantial furniture
may often be found in the possession of the better class of labourers.
The old people accumulate these things, and when their sons or daughters
marry, can generally spare a few chairs, a bedstead and bed, and with a
little crockery from other relations, and a few utensils bought in the
adjacent town, the cottage is furnished sufficiently well for a couple
whose habits are necessarily simple. After marriage the hard work of the
woman's life really begins--work compared with which her early
experience at home is nothing; and many, if they have left situations in
farmhouses, deeply regret the change. The labourer can hardly be
expected to feel the more exalted sentiments; and if in the upper
classes even it is said that romance ends with marriage, it is doubly,
literally true of the agricultural poor. In addition to her household
work, she has to labour in the fields, or to wash--perhaps worse than
the former alternative; and after a while her husband, too commonly
wearying of his home, in which he finds nothing but a tired woman and
troublesome children, leaves her for the public-house, and consumes
two-thirds of their slender income in beer. The attachment of the woman
for her husband lasts longer than that of the man for the woman. Even
when he has become a confirmed drunkard, and her life with incessant
labour has become a burden to her, she will struggle on, striving to get
bread for the children and the rent for the landlord. She knows that as
evening comes on, instead of sitting down to rest, her duty will be to
go down to the public-house and wait till it pleases her lord and master
to try to stagger home, and then to guide his clumsy steps to the
threshold. Of course there are wives who become as bad as their
husbands, who drink, or do worse, and neglect their homes, but they are
the exception. As a rule, the woman, once married, does her best to keep
her home together.

The wife of the labourer does not get her shins smashed with heavy kicks
from hobnailed boots, such as the Lancashire ruffians administer; but,
although serious wife-beating cases are infrequent, there are few women
who escape an occasional blo