"And we didn't drink no tea then. Eight shillings {302} a pound, or maybe seven-and-six--dear, dear, how was we to buy it! We had beer for breakfast and it did us good. It were better than all these nasty cocoa stuffs we drink now. We didn't buy it at the public-house--we brewed it ourselves. And we had a brick oven then, and could put a pie in, and a loaf, and whatever we wanted, and it were proper vittals. We baked barley bread, and black bread, and all sorts of bread, and it did us good and made us strong. These iron ranges and stoves we have now--what's the good o' they? You can't bake bread in 'em. And the wheat bread you gits from the shop, what's it good for? 'Tisn't proper vittals--it fills 'e with wind. No, I say, I'm not going to git the fruit--let the birds have it! Just look at the greedy things--them starlings! I've shouted, and thrown sticks and all sorts of things, and shaken a cloth at 'em, and it's like calling the fowls to feed. The more noise I make the more they come. What I say is, If I can't have the fruit I wish the blackbirds 'ud git it. People say to me, 'Oh, don't talk to me about they blackbirds--they be the worst of all for fruit.' But I never minded that--because--well I'll tell 'e. I mind when I were a little thing at Old Alresford, where I were born, I used to be up at four in the morning, in summer, listening to the blackbirds. And mother she used to say, 'Lord, how she do love to hear a blackbird!' It's always been the same. I's always up at four, and in summer I goes out to hear the blackbird when it do sing so beautiful. But them starlings that come messing {303} about, pulling the straws out of the thatch, I've no patience with they. We didn't have so many starlings when I were young. But things is very different now; and what I say is, I wish they wasn't--I wish they was the same as when I were a girl. And I wish I was a girl again." Listening to this tirade on the degeneracy of modern times, it amused me to recall the very different feeling on the same subject expressed by the old Wolmer Forest woman. But the Itchen woman had more vigour, more staying-power in her: one could see it in the fresh colour in her round face, and the pure colour and brightness of her eyes--brighter and bluer than in most blue-eyed girls. Altogether, she was one of the best examples of the hard-headed, indomitable Saxon peasants I have met with in the south of England. She was past seventy, impeded by an old infirmity, the mother of many men and women with big families of their own, all scattered far and wide over the county,--all too poor themselves to help her in her old age, or to leave their work and come such a distance to see her, excepting when they were in difficulties, for then they would come for what she could spare them out of her hardly-earned little hoard.