Two pigs, fattened yearly on potatoes, and a few lambs, taken from the early clover, met the demands of the landlord. The wool of the sheep, spun, knitted, or woven at home, supplied scant, but sufficient, wardrobes. For fuel they had whins, or furze, cut from the fences, and turf from the bogs. The fire was preserved by _raking_ a half-burned turf every night in the ashes, but a coal to light the fire was occasionally borrowed from more provident neighbors, and carried by a pair of tongs from house to house. Matches were unknown in those days. The men broke stones by the roadsides, on warm days, for pocket-money or tobacco, and the women obtained their little extras by the produce of their surplus eggs, which they carried to market in little osier hand-baskets. Existence in such homes flowed smoothly, one year being exactly like another. The people had no prospects, no hopes, no ambitions. They lived from hand to mouth, and, while all went well, the fulness of each day was sufficient for their simple wants. In their diurnal rounds they gathered their _creels_ of potatoes, and drove their Kerry cows to the fields, golden with tufted ragweeds and purple with prickly thistles. Such people seldom had their rents raised or their improvements confiscated, for the simple reason that they never made improvements, and never sought, through sustained effort, to better their conditions. They had no margin beyond the bare necessaries of life, no resources to fall back upon, in case of calamity. With barely enough to supply their daily wants, they lived on the verge of starvation, and when the famine came they starved. The Brontës were people of a different fibre. They would not succumb without a struggle. They had advanced from the Emdale cabin to the Lisnacreedy cottage, and thence to the house and farm in Ballynaskeagh. The primitive corn-kiln, with its insignificant and precarious profits, had been abandoned for the lucrative occupation of macadamizing roads, and cultivating the land. The Brontës worked hard, and were frugal as well as industrious. They had hoarded the savings of many years, and invested all in a new farm, and they felt that they had a right to look forward to a condition of prosperity and independence. The class to which the Brontës belonged differed widely from the inert and feckless farmers that encumbered many a bankrupt estate. They did not live from hand to mouth, spending each day’s efforts on each day’s wants, and passing the summer in an easy doze. No people on earth slaved and saved as they did. They worked late and early. Their wives and daughters and little children rose with the sun, and labored the live-long day. Every good thing raised on the farm went to market, to meet the landlord’s exactions, and to add to the little store. Butter, bacon, fowl, eggs, and such like, raised by the laborious housewife, were sacred to the landlord, and to the hoard accumulated against the rainy day.