Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 18, 2025
"Choose your own identity for the occasion, my good friend," he said lightly; "and you too, Tony. You may be stonemasons or coal-carriers, chimney-sweeps or farm-labourers, I care not which so long as you look sufficiently grimy and wretched to be unrecognisable, and so long as you can procure a cart without arousing suspicions, and can wait for me punctually at the appointed spot."
Chad and the rougher sort of workmen kept aloof from the grave under the white thorn, where the burial was going forward; but Sandy Jim, and several of the farm-labourers, made a group round it, and stood with their hats off, as fellow-mourners with the mother and sons.
The inhabitants were nearly all wreckers or smugglers they ostensibly carried on the trade and calling of fishermen, farm-labourers, and small farmers; but they were deeply saturated with the sin of covetousness, and many a fierce fire has been lighted on the Wirrall shore on stormy nights to lure the good ship on the Burbo or Hoyle Banks, there to beat, and strain, and throb, until her timbers parted, and her planks were floating in confusion on the stormy waves.
The landlord was a fat, jolly-looking man, and there were several customers in the bar men who looked like farm-labourers, but there were no other houses to be seen anywhere. This extraordinary circumstance exercised the minds of our travellers and formed the principal topic of conversation until they arrived at the Dew Drop Inn, about half an hour afterwards.
He pays his farm-labourers 80 cents, or 1s. 4d., for a day's work. In former days, however, money was never given, and the wages of a farm-servant then were a suit of clothes, a pair of boots, and some linen, while the women received an apron, some linen, and a few petticoats once a year. Now they get in addition to this L12 a year. In former days strangers came to this country to earn money.
A shabbily-lit glass door admitted us into a dreary saloon bar, where a hard-featured, gruff-mannered young countryman, after serving beer to two farm-labourers, admitted with apparent reluctance that beds were to be had by such as had "the price," but that, as to supper, well! supper was "over" supper-time was six-thirty; it was now seven-thirty.
There will not be a weed in our allotment gardens, and our farm-labourers will get all the prizes at cottage flower-shows." "You will hunt, of course?" "Naturally; don't you know that I am to have the hounds next year? It was all arranged a few days ago. Poor Mabel was strongly opposed to the plan.
Improvements in agricultural processes and the application of machinery and steam power, together with bulk-production and scientific localization of crops, threw great quantities of farm-labourers out of work and drove them into the industrial towns, while advances in medical science and in sanitation raised the proportion of births to deaths and soon provided a surplus of potential labour so that the operation of the "law of supply and demand," extolled by a new philosophy and enforced by the new "representative" or democratic and parliamentary government, resulted in an unfailing supply of cheap labour paid wages just beyond the limit of starvation.
Thus, recently, two who arrived at the Headquarters at Whitechapel, alleged that they were farm-labourers from Norfolk. As they did not in the least look the part, inquiries were made, when it was found that they had never been nearer to Norfolk than Hampstead, where both of them had been concerned in the stealing of £10 from a business firm.
Irwine was in the desk, looking benignly round on that simple congregation on the hardy old men, with bent knees and shoulders, perhaps, but with vigour left for much hedge-clipping and thatching; on the tall stalwart frames and roughly cut bronzed faces of the stone-cutters and carpenters; on the half-dozen well-to-do farmers, with their apple-cheeked families; and on the clean old women, mostly farm-labourers' wives, with their bit of snow-white cap-border under their black bonnets, and with their withered arms, bare from the elbow, folded passively over their chests.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking