“How do you do?” I inquired, last time I arrived, of a comfortable healthy-looking woman, who had just been seeing her daughter off by train. Her husband is a steady man, in regular work. She owns the cottage she lives in, and a pig, and has no difficulty in supplying the wants of her family, which are few.
“Oh, I’m not up to much, m’m,” she began. “Things is so hard nowadays, and no one gives we a bit o’ help. There’s that Jane Price, she got a pound of tea, and a hundudweight of coal, and a red flannel petticut, from the lady of the manor at Christmas, and she be a widder with on’y her children. But I on’y got some tea and a petticut (not a nice colour red neither), no coal nor nothing, and thur I’ve got he to keep as well as the children, and in course I need it wuss’n her do!”
Further along the platform I spoke to the wife of a small farmer, a healthy soul, with nothing much to worry her. But she didn’t intend to be behindhand with trouble! Other people found plenty to moan about; she wasn’t to be outdone.
“You’ve heard of the awful time I’m having with my husband? Fell down in the wood and broke his leg in four places! Suffers terrible, he does.”
I expressed sympathy, and asked how long he had been in bed.
“Oh, he isn’t in bed; can’t spare the time to lay up, with the haymaking just on. He’s cutting the five-acre field to-day. He gets about, but he has an abundation of pain at nights. Yes, you’re right. Very active he is, there’s no keeping him still. He’ll walk to his own funeral, he will.”
Actually the man had a touch of rheumatism!
Finally we are settled in the fly, piled up with the lighter luggage, while Abigail and old Bob’s nephew follow in the cart.
To the stranger who has never been in our Valley before, the drive to the Cottage is a thing of wonder; to those of us who do the journey many times in the course of the year new beauties are always revealing themselves, and the whole scene seems more lovely each time we look upon it, if that be possible.