Page:The English Peasant.djvu/250

 Park, the same question, and he too had never heard of such a man as Shakspeare.

Passing through the village I saw four old cots standing in a row together. I had no means of measuring, but I should hardly think each house could have been more than 8 ft. wide and about 15 ft. deep. There were but two rooms. In one I found a woman with four children, and she was on the eve of adding to the number; they all slept, six of them, in one small room.

Next door things look much more comfortable, as it was the home of an old couple, who lived there alone. The little room was very clean, and was furnished with a tall clock, which nearly touched the ceiling. There was a rack, too, with a number of plates of the willow pattern, and some small religious pictures. The old woman had herself worked in the fields until lately, when she hurt one of her eyes. Women are not continuously employed in Warwickshire; but at certain seasons it would appear that many do labour out of doors. In spring-time they are out couching and weeding the crops, in haymaking and harvest they bind up and rake, and at other seasons they pick potatoes and clean turnips. It is not at all economical for married women thus to engage themselves, as they only get 1s. a day in winter and 10d. in summer, working from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, with intervals for meals. All this time they are wearing out their clothes, and leaving their homes and babies to the care of some little daughter. Every now and then sad accidents happen. A medical officer of the union of Warwick says: "I have known at least eight cases in which children left at home have either been burnt or scalded to death. I have occasionally known an opiate in the shape of Godfrey's cordial or Daffy's elixir given by the mother to the children to keep them quiet." The women who thus work rather like it, and it no doubt suits certain temperaments better than the more quiet employment of domestic life. Probably they worked as girls, and of such it is said that they are just the ones who dislike the control of domestic service.

Leaving Shottery, so pretty and yet so miserable, I made my way across the meadows into the Alcester Road.

And now I seemed to have got away from a centre of life, and