er too. In this case they
did without him--six poor men losing half a day's work, and giving their
services. The coffin was too big to be carried down the crooked
staircase; too big also to be got out of the bedroom window until the
window-sashes had been taken out. But these men managed it all,
borrowing tools and a couple of ladders and some ropes; and then, in the
black clothes which they keep for such occasions, they carried the
coffin to the churchyard. That same evening two of them went to work at
cleaning out a cess-pit, two others spent the evening in their gardens,
another had cows to milk, and the sixth, being out of work and restless,
had no occupation to go home to so far as I know.

Of course this, too, was a piece of voluntary service, resembling in
that respect those more striking examples of self-reliance which are
brought out by sudden emergencies. But it points, more directly than
they do, to the sphere in which that virtue is practised until it
becomes a habit. For if you follow the clue on, it leads very quickly to
the scene where self-reliance is so to speak at home, where it seems the
natural product of the people's circumstances--the scene, namely, of
their daily work. For there, not only in the employment by which the men
earn their wages, but in the household and garden work of the women as
well as the men, there is nothing to support them save their own
readiness, their own personal force.

It sounds a truism, but it is worth attention. Unlike the rest of us,
labouring people are unable to shirk any of life's discomforts by
"getting a man" or "a woman," as we say, to do the disagreeable or risky
jobs which continually need to be done. If a cottager in this village
wants his chimney swept, or his pigstye cleaned out, or his firewood
chopped, the only "man" he can get to do it for him is himself.
Similarly with his wife. She may not call in "a woman" to scrub her
floor, or to wash and mend, or to skin a rabbit for dinner, or to make
up the fire for cooking it. It is necessary for her to be ready to turn
from one task to another without squeamishness, and without pausing to
think how she shall do it. In short, she and her husband alike must
practise, in their daily doings, a sort of intrepidity which grows
customary with them; and this habit is the parent of much of that fine
conduct which they exhibit so carelessly in moments of emergency.

Until this fact is appreciated there is no such thing