Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/33

30 stopped at a little cottage this morning, half smothered with roses, geraniums, &c, and, on the pretext of looking at a baby, made good my entrance. The little bit of an apartment, not more than six feet by ten, was as neat as possible. Not an article of its scanty furniture looked as if it bad been bought by this generation; everything appeared cared for, and well preserved; so unlike corresponding dwellings with us. The woman had nine children; six at home, and all tidily dressed. I have not seen in England a slovenly-looking person. Even the three or four beggars who stealthily asked charity of us at Portsmouth were neatly dressed.

I greeted, en passant, a woman sitting at her cottage window. She told me she paid for half of a little tenement and a bit of a garden, ten pounds (fifty dollars) rent. And when I congratulated her on the pleasant country, "Ah," she said, "we can't live on a pleasant country!" I have not addressed one of these people who has not complained of poverty, said something of the difficulty of getting work, of the struggling of bread, which is the condition of existence among the lower classes here. Strange sounds these to our ears!

I was amused to-day with something that marked the diversity of the condition from ours in another way. I accosted a little girl who stood at a cottage-gate. She was as well dressed as S.'s girls, or any of our well-to-do-in-the-world people. Among other impertinent questions I asked "Who lives here?" "Mrs. So-and-so and Mrs. So-and-so." "Only two