Page:The English Peasant.djvu/90

 is perhaps only taken off when it is worn out. The dietary is correspondingly low—many families have nothing but bread from one week's end to the other." He speaks of the depression that he felt on his return from the drive, in which he had seen type after type of social life almost degraded to the level of barbarism.

IV.

The charges these Reports bring against the cottages in East Anglia and those in Mid England are, upon the whole, true of those in the southern counties; and of the metropolitan counties the same dark tale is told.

In Essex Dr Hunter found that a destruction of houses had been going on in twenty-two parishes, without arresting the growth of the population, so that in 1861 a larger number of persons were squeezing themselves into a smaller number of houses than had been the case in 1851. At Great Chesterford he describes some of the cots as "pictures of misery." At Little Chesterton were "plenty of tumble-down houses with most wretched thatches." At Wendon were "some most melancholy cottages; the crumbling clay exposed the ribs, and none but the poorest materials seem used." At Little Hallingbury the floors were of large pebbles set in concrete, which of course busy little fingers were hard at work day by day pulling out. Washing such floors must have been out of the question—a pail of water would leave them as full of pools as a bad road on a rainy day.

In Surrey the commons are skirted by cottages of the poorest description, originally built by squatters out of the waste. In course of time some have been sold, and so rebuilt or repaired as to become decent habitations, but numbers may be found only containing one bedroom and one sitting-room, totally destitute of drainage, and in a wretched condition. Those who live near such commons must have often heard—"they have the fever on the common," that is, the "scarlet fever." Even the pretty, comfortable-looking Surrey towns have their dark spots, and these are just