men, other than those belonging to the families of
tenant-farmers, may be summed up as employed in the following manner.
Bailiff's wives and daughters: these are not supposed, on extensive farms,
to work in the field. The wife frequently has charge of the small home
dairy, and the daughter assists at the house. Sometimes they also attend
to the poultry, now occasionally kept in large numbers. A bailiff's
daughter sometimes becomes housekeeper to a farmer. Dairymaids of the
ordinary class--not competent to make special cheese--are becoming rarer,
on account of the demand for their services decreasing--the milk trade and
cheap foreign cheese having rendered common sorts of cheese unprofitable.
They are usually cottagers. Of the married labouring women and the indoor
servants something has already been said. In most villages a seamstress or
two may be found, and has plenty of work to do for the farmers' families.
The better class of housekeepers, and those professional dairymaids who
superintend the making of superior cheese, are generally more or less
nearly related to the families of tenant-farmers.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE LOW 'PUBLIC' IDLERS

The wise old saw that good wine needs no bush does not hold true in the
case of the labourer; it would require a very large bush indeed to attract
him to the best of beer offered for sale under legitimate conditions. In
fact, he cares not a rap about good beer--that is, intrinsically good, a
genuine product of malt and hops. He would rather grumble at it, unless,
perchance, it was a gift; and even then would criticise it behind the
donor's back, holding the quart cup aslant so as to see the bottom in one
place, and get a better view of the liquor. The great breweries whose
names are household words in cities, and whose interest it is to maintain
a high standard of quality for the delectation of their million consumers,
do not exalt their garish painted advertisements in gilded letters as tall
as Tom Thumb over the doors of village alehouses. You might call for Bass
at Cairo, Bombay, Sydney, or San Francisco, and Bass would be forthcoming.
But if you knocked the trestle-table with the bottom of a tankard (the
correct way) in a rural public, as a signal to the cellar you might call
for Bass in vain.

When the agricultural labourer drops in on his way home from his work of a
winter evening--heralding his approach by casting down a couple of logs or
bundle of wood which he