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Updated: May 24, 2025
It breaks my heart to see you unappreciated, neglected, living the sort of rough life that might suit a labourer's daughter, but which is sacrilege for Lady Bridget O'Hara. A man had no right to condemn a beautiful, refined woman like you to such a fate.... Well there' as she murmured incoherently, 'I'll not say any more about that since it hurts you. You see, I respect your wishes.
According to any reasonable interpretation of the words and spirit of Christ, a labourer's desire to enjoy the utmost that he himself produces is no less legitimate than natural; but it hardly ranks as one of the highest Christian virtues. How, we might ask, is it to acquire this latter character by being turned into a desire for what is produced by other people?
It is shameful that while the proprietors' houses, and the farmers' houses, have been enlarged and improved so much during the last century, the cottage of the hind and the cotter should still be of the same miserable description; the partitions to be made at the labourer's own expense, and too generally done by the enclosed beds, which are not right things in a sanitary point of view.
In spite of the check which my wet clothes might have occasioned, I was rapidly gaining strength, and, to my surprise, got easily through the duty. At the conclusion of the service, a labourer's wife came up to me with the usual fee between her finger and thumb, the price of being grateful to her God for safe deliverance in child-birth.
In the midst of it was a quantity of manure, all wet and sloppy, and upon the very top of this heap stood that charming boy, Master Tom, with his shoes and stockings all covered with mire. On one side of the yard stood James, talking to a boy in a labourer's frock. These last were very busy with their own talk, and paid no heed to Tom, who kept calling to them.
There is a great probability, too, that a bristle of stunted brambles may be supporting the body at some inches above the soil. Slung by the labourer's spade, which has just broken his back, the Mole falls here, there, anywhere, at random; and where the body falls, no matter what the obstacles, provided that they be not insurmountable, there the undertaker must utilize it.
I went on that afternoon to pass an hour in the churchyard, and finding an old man in labourer's clothes resting on a tomb, I sat down and entered into conversation with him. He was seventy-nine, he told me, and past work, and he had three shillings a week from the parish; but he was very deaf and it fatigued me to talk to him, and seeing the church open I went in.
As he drove down a lane with his father towards the railway station, those long years ago, he had seen the girl's face looking at him from the window of a labourer's cottage at the crossroads; and its stupefied desolation haunted him for many years, even after the girl had married and gone to live in Scotland that place of torment for an Irish soul.
About a week afterwards a young doe sambur, which was being pursued by jungle dogs, rushed into one of the labourer's huts and was secured. It was then resolved to keep the deer as a companion for the bison, and the two were kept together, though they were never shut up. They were first of all fed on milk, and then allowed to graze, and soon became quite inseparable companions.
I know, of course, that rent takes from three and sixpence a week for the poorest hovels to six shillings for the newer tenements on the outskirts of the parish; in other words, that from a quarter to a third of the labourer's whole income goes back immediately into the pockets of the employing classes for shelter alone.
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