Page:The English Peasant.djvu/199

 My board is simply spread, &emsp;&emsp;I have a little food to spare, But thou shall break my wholesome bread, &emsp;&emsp;And have a wholesome share. nbsp;For while the faggot burns &emsp;&emsp;To warm my cottage floor, They never shall say the poor man turns &emsp;&emsp;A poorer from his door. &emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Then come, come to the ingle-side, etc.

If thou wert rich and strong, &emsp;&emsp;I would not ask thee in; But thy journey has been long &emsp;&emsp;And thy tattered garb is thin. Thy limbs are stiff with cold, &emsp;Thy hair is snowy white, Thou art a pilgim far too old &emsp;&emsp;To face this bitter night. Less pity might there be &emsp;&emsp;In breast more warmly clad, But I have been as poor as thee, &emsp;&emsp;As hungry, and as sad. &emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Then come, come to the ingle-side, etc.

Where a labourer or his wife is idle and improvident, the sordid misery into which they sink is something beyond belief. In Rotherfield I went into one cottage where a woman sat in the grimy chimney corner, trying to make a kettle boil over a few sticks of wood. Two little girls were hanging over the dying embers, for it was miserably cold. The mother took us upstairs, where there were two compartments. In the first, a sort of landing, the parents slept on a miserable bed almost on a level with the floor. In a small outer room was a little shake-down on which the children slept. Not a chair, nor a table, nor any other article of furniture, was in the room. In the parents' sleeping-place the wet came in, so that the woman said one night she was wet through. She had had ten children, but had only reared two. One boy died when he was nine; the others had died mostly of decline and galloping consumption—slow starvation, in fact! For this miserable habitation they paid two shillings a week. It had, however, a garden, in which they raised cabbages. Her husband earned, on an average, ten shillings a week all the year round.