Page:The English Peasant.djvu/100

 On a winter's evening the family circle gather round the cheerful fire, the women knitting, the father mending shoes—an art nearly all acquire—while one of the younger ones reads for the benefit of the whole group.

Notwithstanding such a high degree of domestic happiness as these facts suggest, the report speaks strongly concerning the miserable accommodation many of the Northumbrian cottages afford. Formerly they were mere sheds, without window frames, partitions, grates, or ceiling; the unfortunate tenant had to bring all these things with him, so that if the weather was wet he frequently found a great puddle on the earthen floor.

Even yet there are cots to which this description exactly applies, and the miseries the inhabitants have to undergo, especially with their taste for the comfortable, must be great. Under any circumstances it must be extremely "confusing," as one woman mildly put it, to have to perform all the operations of bedroom, parlour, and kitchen in one apartment, and quite distressing when any member of the family is sick.

The "bondager" system peculiar to Northumberland, by which every farm labourer is bound to provide a woman whose labour shall be at the disposal of the master whenever he may require it, and whom the labourer is therefore obliged to have lodging in his house, does not conduce to domestic comfort. So favourable, however, are his other conditions, and such is the superiority of his character, that these two circumstances—a miserable cottage with only one room, and a stranger lodging with him—do not prevent the Northumbrian peasant possessing a decent, happy home.

No doubt something is due to the fact that he comes of a race which has dwelt for generations on the battle-field of English history, developing a power of struggling with and conquering difficulties. Something also may be attributed to the climate. The average mortality in the Glendale Union, one of the largest agricultural districts in Northumberland, from the year 1851 to 1860, was only fifteen per thousand, whereas the general average of Great Britain is twenty-two per thousand. And again, to the favourable conditions of his service, he being hired by the year, and paid alike in wet weather or dry, in sickness and in health. And perhaps more than to any of these causes, though they all