Rough though it be, the childhood of the cottage girl is not without its recompenses, the most valuable of which is sturdy health.  Now that good schools are open to every village, so soon as the children are old enough to walk the distance, often considerable, they are sent off every morning.  At all events, if it does nothing else, it causes the mothers to give them a daily tidying up, which is in itself an advantage.  They travel under the charge of the girl; often two or three such small parties join company, coming from as many cottages.  In the warmer months, the lanes and fields they cross form a long playground for them, and picking flowers and searching for birds’-nests pass away the time.  In winter they have to face the mire and rain.

When the girl leaves school she is hardly old enough to enter service, and too often in the year or so that elapses before she ‘goes out’ much mischief is done.  She is then at an age when the mind is peculiarly receptive, and the ways of the young labourers with whom she is thrown into contact are not very refined.  Her first essay at ‘service’ is often as day-nursemaid at some adjacent farmhouse, taking care of the younger children in the day, and returning home to sleep.  She then wanders with the children about the same fields she visited long before.  This system used to be common enough, but latterly it has not worked well, because the parents expect the girl to progress so rapidly.  She must be a woman and receive a woman’s wages almost before she has ceased to be a girl.  If she does not disdain to enter a farmhouse as kitchen-maid her wages will probably be about six pounds a year at first.  Of course the exact sum varies very much in different localities and in different cases.  It is but a small sum of money, yet it is often all she is worth.

The cottage is a poor preparation even for the humblest middle-class home.  Those ladies in towns who have engaged country servants are well aware of the amount of teaching they require before they can go through the simplest duties in a satisfactory manner.  But most of these girls have already been out several times before reaching town.  What a difficulty, then, the first farmer’s wife must have had in drilling the rudiments of civilised life into them!  Indeed, the vexations and annoyances connected with servants are no light weight upon the patience of the tenant-farmer.  His wife is perpetually preparing servant girls for the service of other people.

She is a kind of unpaid teacher, for ever shaping the rough material which, so soon as it is worth higher wages than a tenant-farmer can usually pay, is off, and the business has to be begun over again.  No one who had not seen it would believe how clumsy and unthinking such girls are on first ‘going out.’  It is, too, the flightiest and giddiest period of their existence—­before the girl sobers down into the woman.  In the houses of the majority of tenant-farmers the mistress herself has to be a good deal in the kitchen, and therefore comes into close personal contact with the servants, and feels these things acutely.  Except in the case of gentleman-farmers it may, perhaps, be said that almost all the wives of farmers have had experience of this kind.