I know one woman, however, who quite successfully undertakes very strenuous garden work, including digging, having been inured to it at a very early age.  If she could be spared from her own work to take the position of instructress for young girls determined to make the land their chief employment, they would be saved a vast amount of unnecessary fatigue and labour by learning the art of using spades, forks, hoes, and rakes in the way that experience teaches, relying more upon the weight and designed capabilities of the tool to do the work than upon their own untrained muscles.

We could always get a supply of excellent maids for house-work from among the village families; they began very young, coming in for a few hours daily to help the regular staff, and, as these left or got married, they were ready trained to take their places.  These girls were quite free from the self-importance of the present-day domestic, but I remember one nice village girl about whom we inquired as a likely maid who, it then appeared, was engaged to marry a thriving small tradesman.  The girl’s mother, being over-elated at her daughter’s apparently brilliant prospects of independence, rejected the proposal with some hauteur, adding that her daughter “would soon be keeping her own maid.”  I fear, however, that she was disappointed, as the course of true love did not run smooth.

We preferred a married man as shepherd, because, when I had only a few cows, he combined his duties with those of cowman; and, bringing in the milk and doing the churning, he was much about the back premises.  On one occasion, however, I engaged a young bachelor, partly because he replied, with a knowing smile, to a question as to whether he was married, that he dared say he could be if he liked—­which I optimistically took to amount to an announcement of his engagement.

Time went on and he remained a single man, but it was observable that he lingered on his milky way, and was more in evidence in the dairy than his duties appeared to warrant.  We concluded that he was attracted by the cook.  One day my wife said to another maid:  “I can’t think why the shepherd spends so much time in the house.  I suppose cook is the attraction?” The girl blushed, hesitated, and looked down, but finally courageously murmured:  “Please, mum, it’s me, mum!” They were married in due course, and we lost an excellent servant.

Some of the village women and girls filled up spare moments with “gloving”; the large kid-glove manufacturers in Worcester supplied the material, cut into shape, and a stand, with a kind of vice divided into spaces the exact size of each stitch, which held the work firmly while the stitching was done by hand; they grew very quick at this work, and turned out the gloves with beautifully even stitches, but I don’t think they could earn much at it in a day, and it must have been rather monotonous.