Page:The English Peasant.djvu/174

 Only she did not think she was fairly paid. "I go and do more than a man would, and yet they give a shilling instead of half a crown."

Thus the money flows in from all sources, the family purse gets replenished, and should the father continue in good employ and have no serious illness they may be said to do moderately well.

The ordinary wages of a Kentish waggoner are about fourteen shillings a week. A correspondent of the Field newspaper, an agriculturist in East Kent, in a letter which appeared in that paper this year, says that in his locality, the Isle of Thanet, some farmers pay fifteen shillings a week, that he himself pays threepence an hour, and gives the average earnings of his men last year:—

—which is nearly seventeen shillings a week all the year round for the father's earnings alone. In addition to this, the wife will earn from two shillings to half a crown a week, while the bigger children will be getting from three to seven shillings a week.

Food in an average family of half a dozen children will probably come to sixteen or seventeen shillings; for, working as they all do, from morning till night, it is necessary that they should live well. And this in fact is the great and beneficial result of Kentish agricultural economy. Supper is the social meal of the day; and the honest waggoner, when he sits down after all the toils of the day, comes to it with an appetite as capacious as the omnivorous giant Jack of bean-stalk fame had the honour of dining with. He will commence with a large beefsteak pudding, and finish up with a basin full of bread and milk or several cups of tea. As to the boys who work, each one rivals his father, the bigger one perhaps outdoing him altogether. As a result the men are stalwart, the women rubicund. There is a harmony in the appearance of both land and people. It is a well-nurtured land, and the people are a well-nurtured people.