accepting a position which is often invidious, than lift a hand to work at
home, so great is the repugnance to manual labour. These, again, have no
domestic knowledge (beyond that of teaching children), none of cooking, or
general household management. If they marry a tenant farmer of their own
class, with but small capital, they are too often a burden financially.
Whence comes this intense dislike to hand work--this preference for the
worst paid head work? It is not confined, of course, to the gentler sex.
No more striking feature of modern country life can be found.

You cannot blame these girls, whether poor or moderately well-to-do, for
thinking of something higher, more refined and elevating than the
cheese-tub or the kitchen. It is natural, and it is right, that they
should wish to rise above that old, dull, dead level in which their
mothers and grandmothers worked from youth to age. The world has gone on
since then--it is a world of education, books, and wider sympathies. In
all this they must and ought to share. The problem is how to enjoy the
intellectual progress of the century and yet not forfeit the advantages of
the hand labour and the thrift of our ancestors? How shall we sit up late
at night, burning the midnight oil of study, and yet rise with the dawn,
strong from sweet sleep, to guide the plough? One good thing must be
scored down to the credit of the country girls of the day. They have done
much to educate the men. They have shamed them out of the old rough,
boorish ways; compelled them to abandon the former coarseness, to become
more gentlemanly in manner. By their interest in the greater world of
society, literature, art, and music (more musical publications probably
are now sold for the country in a month than used to be in a year), they
have made the somewhat narrow-sighted farmer glance outside his parish. If
the rising generation of tenant farmers have lost much of the bigoted
provincial mode of thought, together with the provincial pronunciation, it
is undoubtedly due to the influence of the higher ideal of womanhood that
now occupies their minds. And this is a good work to have accomplished.

CHAPTER X

MADEMOISELLE, THE GOVERNESS

A country 'roadside' railway station seemed deserted upon a warm August
afternoon. It was all but concealed on that level ground by the hedges and
trees of the fields with which it was surrounded. There was no sound of
man or wheels, and nothing mov