In summer we had two services—­one in the forenoon and one in the afternoon.  In winter we had two services at one sitting, which was a thing astonishing to English visitors.  The first was generally called a lecture—­a reading with comments, of a passage of Scriture—­a dozen verses or more—­and the second a regularly built sermon, with three or four heads, and some particulars, and a practical summing up.

Prices and cost of living had fallen since my mother had married in 1815, three months after the battle of Waterloo.  At that time tea cost 8/0 a lb., loaf sugar, 1/4, and brown sugar 11 1/2d.  Bread and meat were then still at war prices, and calico was no cheaper than linen. and that was dear.  She paid 3/6 a yard for fine calico to make petticoats.  Other garments were of what was called home made linen.  White cotton stockings at 4/9, and thinner at 3/9 each; silk stockings at 11/6.  I know she paid 36/ for a yard of Brussels net to make caps of.  It was a new thing to have net made in the loom.  When a woman married she must wear caps at least in the morning.  In 1838 my mother bought a chest of tea (84 lb.) for 20 pounds, a trifle under 5/0 a lb.; the retail price was 6/0—­it was a great saving; and up to the time of our departure brown sugar cost 7 1/2d., and loaf sugar 10d.  It is no wonder that these things were accounted luxuries.  When a decent Scotch couple in South Australia went out to a station in the country in the forties and received their stores, the wife sat down at her quarter-chest of tea and gazed at her bag of sugar, and fairly wept to think of her old mother across the ocean, who had such difficulty in buying an ounce of tea and a pound of sugar.  My mother even saw an old woman buy 1/4oz. of tea and pay 11/2d. for it, and another woman buy 1/4lb. of meat.

We kept three maids.  The cook got 8 pounds a year, the housemaid 7 pounds, and the nursemaid 6 pounds, paid half-yearly, but the summer half-year was much better paid than the winter, because there was the outwork in the fields, weeding and hoeing turnips and potatoes, and haymaking.  The winter work in the house was heavier on account of the fires and the grate cleaning, but the wages were less.  My mother gave the top wages in the district, and was considerate to her maids, but I blush yet to think how poorly those good women who made the comfort of my early home were paid for their labours.  You could get a washerwoman for a shilling or 1/6 a day, but you must give her a glass of whisky as well as her food.  You could get a sewing girl for a shilling or less, without the whisky.  And yet cheap as sewing was it was the pride of the middle-elms women of those days that they did it all themselves at home.  Half of the time of girls’ schools was given to sewing when mother was taught.  Nearly two hours a day was devoted to it in my time.