A homely, domestic man, typically English in his virtues and in the limitations of his virtues, was my mason friend. In the good times of the past he used to make 35s., 37s. 6d., and £2:1:6 a week at his trade, "steady work and constant." As a bachelor he found that all his money went as fast as he made it. After one long spell on £2:1:6 a week he had nothing at all left to tide over a week without work. That set his thoughts to matrimony and he "settled down." Since then his finances had been much more steady and prosperous. While he was in work he always paid his wife 30s. a week out of his wages, no more and no less. "He didn't come asking her for some of it back in the middle of the week like some men did. Thirty shillings she had, regular, when he was in work, and she saved some of it." Whatever the balance was, 5s. or 7s. 6d. or 11s. 8d., was for himself. That was his pocket-money, and he spent it in a moderate and sensible roystering, and on other comforts of the manly life. The virtues of his wife as a housekeeper he talked of sturdily. Such a thing as baker's bread--"nasty, unwholesome stuff"--was never seen in his house: it was all home-baked bread. Part of the secret of the housekeeping in unemployed times was perhaps the fact that they had two lodgers, who paid 3s. 6d. a week each for their quarters and paid for the "raw material" of their meals, having the food cooked free. I was interested to learn that 11-1/2d. a week was charged to each of the lodgers for the flour used in his bread--not an extravagant weekly expenditure on that item of food. [Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF AMBERLEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE] A good average man this, not at all heroic, common-sensible, and strictly moderate in his virtues, keeping a very good margin of his wages for himself, but not poaching on the remainder. Probably the wife has much the harder life of the two, with her 30s. a week steady when the good man is in work, and nothing at all but the lodgers' money at other times; probably, too, she is happy enough. May a change of fortune soon bring steady work! Studied from the English country-side the life of the lowly appeared to me often pitiful but rarely abject. It was relieved from squalor by much heroic courage; and by evidences of that beautiful love of the green fields which the English seem to have by nature. In London the position is more depressing, for there one encounters a vast army in which are mingled inextricably poor victims worthy of the fullest compassion, and cunning "wasters" who, finding it easy to live without work, are resolved not to work.