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Updated: June 24, 2025
I've often swum farther; but I'd been three hours in the marsh getting those things for the girls, and it was washing-day, and I'd been up nearly all night with Grandpa; so don't blame the sea, please, Captain John." "You should have called me; I was waiting for you, Ruth." "I didn't know it. I'm used to doing things myself. It might have been too late for Milly if I'd waited."
"I prophesied fair weather," said the cock, "because it is our good mistress's washing-day, and she wants to dry the clothes; but because to-morrow is Sunday, and company is coming, the mistress has no pity on me, and has told the cook to put me into the soup to-morrow, and I must have my head cut off to-night: so now I am crowing with all my might as long as I can."
There are sombre carved wood chairs set back against the wall. It is all very costly, but to us it seems uncomfortable and funereal. The chief things that attract us are rows of little red pieces of paper of odd lengths hanging over strings from the ceiling, as if they were drying after a washing-day.
In the kitchen, paved with small pebbles, two months' accumulation of used linen had been pressed down in an old wine-cask, and boiling water was now being poured upon it through a cloth covered with a layer of wood ashes. In these rural places the washing-day is usually once in two or three months.
In view of so wretched a state of things, we accept the ancient Deluge not merely as an insulated phenomenon, but as a periodical necessity, and acknowledge that nothing less than such a general washing-day could suffice to cleanse the slovenly old world of its moral and material dirt.
'Never say die, sir! If She don't smile upon you, there's a many as will. You are a young gentleman to be smiled on, Mr. Copperfull, and you must learn your walue, sir. Mrs. Crupp always called me Mr. Copperfull: firstly, no doubt, because it was not my name; and secondly, I am inclined to think, in some indistinct association with a washing-day.
Now they were so close to the waves that the spray splashed over the little party; and, it being high-water, the incoming tide, aided by the stiff south-easterly wind, which was still blowing half a gale, rolled the billows in upon the shore, dashing them against the sea-wall and rampart at the back of the castle with a mighty din, and breaking them into sheets of foam that flew over the moats and fortifications, reaching to the Common beyond the spent water, driven back by the rocky embankment, sullenly retiring, a seething sea of soapsuds, as if Davy Jones were having a grand "washing-day."
And, strangest of all, my wife, who only went to church Sunday morning, and would not even sing in the choir, seemed to be as tired Monday morning as I was, only as it was washing-day she could not sleep as late. About two months ago I was laid up with a boil, and could not go to church.
It was not every day that that washing-day wind met so fine a lady, and it was charming to see how gently he played about her stockings. "Ah, wind," I said, "evidently you are a gallant born; but tell us the name of the lady. It is somewhere on that pretty petticoat, I'll be bound."
But how these passages take you back to the homely life of those days! 'Do read some. 'Well, listen to this, "And then to bed without prayers, to-morrow being washing-day." Fancy such a detail coming down to us through two centuries. 'Why no prayers? 'I don't know. I suppose they had to get up early on washing-days, and so they wanted to go to sleep soon.
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