Agricultural women, other than those belonging to the families of tenant-farmers, may be summed up as employed in the following manner.  Bailiff’s wives and daughters:  these are not supposed, on extensive farms, to work in the field.  The wife frequently has charge of the small home dairy, and the daughter assists at the house.  Sometimes they also attend to the poultry, now occasionally kept in large numbers.  A bailiff’s daughter sometimes becomes housekeeper to a farmer.  Dairymaids of the ordinary class—­not competent to make special cheese—­are becoming rarer, on account of the demand for their services decreasing—­the milk trade and cheap foreign cheese having rendered common sorts of cheese unprofitable.  They are usually cottagers.  Of the married labouring women and the indoor servants something has already been said.  In most villages a seamstress or two may be found, and has plenty of work to do for the farmers’ families.  The better class of housekeepers, and those professional dairymaids who superintend the making of superior cheese, are generally more or less nearly related to the families of tenant-farmers.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE LOW ‘PUBLIC’ IDLERS

The wise old saw that good wine needs no bush does not hold true in the case of the labourer; it would require a very large bush indeed to attract him to the best of beer offered for sale under legitimate conditions.  In fact, he cares not a rap about good beer—­that is, intrinsically good, a genuine product of malt and hops.  He would rather grumble at it, unless, perchance, it was a gift; and even then would criticise it behind the donor’s back, holding the quart cup aslant so as to see the bottom in one place, and get a better view of the liquor.  The great breweries whose names are household words in cities, and whose interest it is to maintain a high standard of quality for the delectation of their million consumers, do not exalt their garish painted advertisements in gilded letters as tall as Tom Thumb over the doors of village alehouses.  You might call for Bass at Cairo, Bombay, Sydney, or San Francisco, and Bass would be forthcoming.  But if you knocked the trestle-table with the bottom of a tankard (the correct way) in a rural public, as a signal to the cellar you might call for Bass in vain.

When the agricultural labourer drops in on his way home from his work of a winter evening—­heralding his approach by casting down a couple of logs or bundle of wood which he has been carrying with a thud outside the door—­he does not demand liquor of that character.  When in harvest time, after sundown—­when the shadows forbid farther cutting with the fagging hook at the tall wheat—­he sits on the form without, under the elm tree, and feels a whole pocketful of silver, flush of money like a gold-digger at a fortunate rush, he does not indulge in Allsopp or Guinness.  He hoarsely orders a ‘pot’ of some local