of butcher’s meat, generally a leg of mutton, once a week.  It was cooked for Sunday, and, so far as that kind of meat was concerned, lasted till the next Sunday.  But his wife met this extravagant innovation with furious opposition.  It was sheer waste; it was something almost unpardonably prodigal.  They had eaten bacon all their lives, often bacon with the bristles thick upon it, and to throw away money like this was positively wicked.  However, the-old gentleman, being stubborn as a horse-nail, persisted; the wife, still grumbling, calmed down; and the one joint of meat became an institution.  Harry, the younger, still kept it up; but it had lost its significance in his day, for he had a fowl or two in the week, and a hare or a partridge, and, besides, had the choicest hams.

Now, this dispute between the old gentleman and his wife—­this dispute as to which should be most parsimonious—­was typical of their whole course of life.  If one saved cheese-parings, the other would go without cheese at all, and be content with dry bread.  They lived—­indeed, harder than their own labourers, and it sometimes happened that the food they thought good enough was refused by a cottager.  When a strange carter, or shepherd, or other labourer came to the house from a distance, perhaps with a waggon for a load of produce or with some sheep, it was the custom to give them some lunch.  These men, unaccustomed even in their own cottages to such coarse food, often declined to eat it, and went away empty, but not before delivering their opinion of the fare, expressed in language of the rudest kind.

No economy was too small for old Hodson; in the house his wife did almost all the work.  Nowadays a farmer’s house alone keeps the women of one, or even two, cottages fully employed.  The washing is sent out, and occupies one cottage woman the best part of her spare time.  Other women come in to do the extra work, the cleaning up and scouring, and so on.  The expense of employing these women is not great; but still it is an expense.  Old Mrs. Hodson did everything herself, and the children roughed it how they could, playing in the mire with the pigs and geese.  Afterwards, when old Hodson began to get a little money, they were sent to a school in a market town.  There they certainly did pick up the rudiments, but lived almost as hard as at home.  Old Hodson, to give an instance of his method, would not even fatten a pig, because it cost a trifle of ready money for ‘toppings,’ or meal, and nothing on earth could induce him to part with a coin that he had once grasped.  He never fattened a pig (meaning for sale), but sold the young porkers directly they were large enough to fetch a sovereign a-piece, and kept the money.

The same system was carried on throughout the farm.  The one he then occupied was of small extent, and he did a very large proportion of the work himself.  He did not purchase stock at all in the modern sense; he grew them.  If he went to a sale he bought one or two despicable-looking cattle at the lowest price, drove them home, and let them gradually gather condition.  The grass they ate grew almost as they ate it—­in his own words, ’They cut their own victuals’—­i.e. with their teeth.  He did not miss the grass blades, but had he paid a high price then he would have missed the money.