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 frequent some years ago than they are now. They are a sort of out-servants of the landlords and farmers. The usual reward which they receive from their masters is a house, a small garden for pot herbs, as much grass as will feed a cow, and, perhaps, an acre or two of bad arable land. When their master has occasion for their labor, he gives them, besides, two pecks of oatmeal a week, worth about sixteenpence sterling. During a great part of the year he has little or no occasion for their labor, and the cultivation of their own little possession is not sufficient to occupy the time which is left at their own disposal. When such occupiers were more numerous than they are at present, they are said to have been willing to give their spare time for a very small recompense to anybody, and to have wrought for less wages than other laborers. In ancient times they seem to have been common all over Europe. In countries ill-cultivated and worse inhabited, the greater part of landlords and farmers could not otherwise provide themselves with the extraordinary number of hands which country labor requires at certain seasons. The daily or weekly recompense which such laborers occasionally received from their masters was evidently not the whole price of their labor. Their small tenement made a considerable part of it. This daily or weekly recompense, however, seems to have been considered as the whole of it by many writers who have collected the prices of labor and provisions in ancient times, and who have taken pleasure in representing both as wonderfully low.

The produce of such labor comes frequently cheaper to market than would otherwise be suitable to its nature. Stockings, in many parts of Scotland, are knit much