The long rains of this most rainy province impose long hours of idleness on peasant labourers, and Señor Failde suggests that these hours might be usefully and beneficially employed in factories, but there are none: there are practically no factories in Galicia beyond a few small ones for salting fish and tanning leather. The land being divided into very small holdings, numerous families are out of work half the year, and the products of their other half-year’s work stagnates for want of proper roads and means of transport to favourable markets. Many of the peasants actually feed their pigs with milk, when they might be making butter to rival that of Holland, Switzerland, or Denmark! Galicia is a province peculiarly adapted to the cultivation of the vine, but each peasant makes his own wine from his own grapes, and there is no wine-making industry. Beetroot grows there to perfection, but there are no sugar factories. Salmon trout are so plentiful in many parts that they are almost given away, and cartloads of sardines are used by the peasants as manure for their fields. A close union of agriculture and industrial labour would, in the opinion of Señor Failde, form a solution to the whole problem of Gallegan emigration. This is not a new suggestion; Le Play put it forward long ago in his study of the working classes of Europe. Señor Failde has a sorry tale to unfold as to the immorality of Gallegan peasants, but I have heard equally serious allegations brought against the Presbyterian crofters of western Scotland by people dwelling among them. Illegitimate births are, we hear, on the increase in Galicia. Señor Failde assures us that quite fifty per cent of the young men who emigrate from Galicia to South America are illegitimate children, and youths who go to hide their dishonour beyond the sea. The village festivals and country fairs are centres of corruption, however poetically they may present themselves to foreigners. Usury is almost as rampant among the Gallegans as it is among the peasants of Russia, and it hides itself under the most varied forms. Not only does this evil despoil the poor at home, it even accompanies them in their emigration, for the very agents who make a living out of enticing the wretched fellows to embark are usurers of the worst kind; their agents make special efforts to persuade those who are liable to military service to escape the duty that their country imposes upon them, because they know that for every man persuaded to emigrate they will be well remunerated. CHAPTER XV ROSALIA CASTRO A sweet singer--A drop of Galicia’s life-blood--Rosalia’s lyrics--Home-sickness--_Cantares Gallegas_--_Follas Novas_--The ancient Britons--A star of the first magnitude--The outpourings of a poetic soul--A harp of two strings--Why the poetry of Galicia cannot be translated--Rosalia’s remains transferred to Santo Domingo--The procession--The poetry of Galicia