As a child, the cottage girl ‘roughs’ it in the road and in the fields.  In winter she learns to slide, and to endure the cold and rain, till she often becomes what, to any one accustomed to a more delicate life, seems positively impervious to weather.  The servants in old-fashioned farmhouses really did not seem to know what it was to feel cold.  Even nowadays, a servant fresh from an outlying hamlet, where her parents probably could procure but little fuel beyond what was necessary for cooking, at first cares not an atom whether there be a fire in the kitchen or not.  Such girls are as hardy as the men of their native place.  After a time, hot rooms and a profusion of meat and good living generally saps and undermines this natural strength.  Then they shiver like town-bred people.

The cottage child is often locked out by her parents, who go to work and leave her in charge of her still smaller brothers and sisters.  They play about the hedges and ditches, and very rarely come to any harm.  In autumn their little fingers are employed picking up the acorns fallen from the oaks, for which the formers pay so much per bushel.  In spring is their happiest time.  The joy of life—­the warm sunshine and pleasant breeze of spring—­is not wholly lost upon them, despite their hard fare, and the not very affectionate treatment they receive at home.  Such a girl may then be seen sitting under a willow beside the brook, with her charges around her—­the little brother that can just toddle, the baby that can but crawl and crow in the green fresh grass.  Between them lies a whole pile of flowers—­dandelion stems made into rings, and the rings joined together so as to form a chain, rushes plaited, blue-bells, cowslips tied up in balls, and cowslips loose, their yellow petals scattered over the sward.

The brook flows murmuring by, with an occasional splash, as a water-rat dives from the bank or a fish rises to an insect.  The children weave their flowers and chant some old doggrel rhymes with little or no meaning.  Long afterwards that girl will retain an unconscious memory of the scene, when, wheeling her employer’s children out on some suburban road, she seeks a green meadow and makes a cowslip ball for the delighted infants.  In summer they go down to the hay-field, but dare not meddle with the hay, which the bailiff does not like to see disturbed; they remain under the shadow of the hedge.  In autumn they search for the berries, like the birds, nibbling the hips and haws, tasting crabs and sloes, or feasting on the fruit of a hazel-bush.

Be it spring or summer, autumn or winter, wherever the child may be, her eyes are ever on the watch to find a dead stick or a broken branch, too heavy to lift, but which may be dragged behind, in order to feed the cottage fire at night.  That is her first duty as a child; if she remains in the hamlet that will be her duty through life, and to the last, as an aged woman.  So in London, round the purlieus of buildings in the course of erection—­even in the central thoroughfares, in busy Fleet Street—­children hang about the temporary hoardings, and pick up the chips and splinters of deal.  But the latter have not the pleasure of the blue-bells and cowslips, nor even of the hips and haws, nor does the fresh pure breeze play upon their foreheads.