Within doors all domestic equipment was on the same primitive scale as the housing. At meal-times the pot containing the thick oatmeal porridge which was the staple food was placed in the centre of the table, and each member of the family--servants included--fell to work with his own spoon. Barley for broth was prepared on the knocking-stone, counterpart of the Mexican _metate_. Pewter dishes were a luxury, and crockery ones almost unknown. Wooden trenchers were frequently used even by the clergy, and were the regular thing in farmhouses; the milk was kept in wooden vessels so permeated with dirt and bacteria that it soured in a few hours. The entire family lived and ate and slept in two rooms, with sometimes a windowless loft above as additional sleeping-quarters for the servants or some of the older children. Every cottage had at least one box-bed built into the wall. When the occupants retired and closed the sliding wooden doors they enjoyed a practically airless seclusion amid their own effluvia. The rest of the family slept on rough cots, or even straw pallets on the floor. The popular saying, ‘The clartier [dirtier] the cosier’, was not satire; it was just a matter-of-fact summary of rural living conditions. In dwellings like these, where a large family was often augmented by several servants, privacy was as impossible as in an army barrack. Any conversation too intimate to be shouted above the uproar of the children into the ears of a mixed audience had to be conducted elsewhere than in the house--in the fields, if the weather permitted; in the stable otherwise. Even so, of course, all the circumstances leading up to the conversation were known to a large and intensely interested group. Hence the young people, making a virtue of publicity, took their cronies into their confidence and employed them to arrange their trysts. Thus if James Smith beckoned Jean Armour or Betsy Miller away from her giggling family it was fairly certain that he was making an appointment for Rob Mossgiel and not for himself; if Burns waited on Jenny Surgeoner it was in John Richmond’s interests and not in his own. It was difficult to surprise, and impossible to shock by any of the normal processes of nature, a people who lived in such conditions. No one had to explain ‘the facts of life’ to the children of that world; they witnessed them daily. It would almost seem that a belief in original virtue, rather than original sin, was requisite to explain why the moral status of the peasantry was often so much less squalid than their physical surroundings.