DOMESTIC WAYS SINCE THE TIMES OF HENRY VIII. BY NANETTE MASON. PART I. THE REIGNS OF HENRY VIII., EDWARD VI., AND MARY I. In the following articles we propose to treat of home life in bygone days. That being the case, our net will be spread wide enough to catch a very miscellaneous collection of facts. Nothing will come amiss to us that in any way illustrates the domestic existence of our ancestors, and every reader, whatever her turn of mind, will be sure to find something worth taking note of. It will be a different sort of narrative from the history of great men, or a tale of battles, sieges, and such-like imposing circumstances. We shall speak of houses and furniture, food and clothing, etiquette and good manners, wages and prices, education and superstition, household industries and household amusements, old recipes and domestic medicines, the ways of the poor and the ways of the rich. We shall make as much of needles and pins as ordinary history-books do of swords and guns, and a girl singing an old song will have more attention than they give to an ambassador negotiating a foreign treaty. The worst of it is that the subject is long, whilst our space is of necessity short. We shall try, however, to change that disadvantage into an advantage, by giving only those facts that appear most interesting. There is a pleasure, too, when reading about a subject, to know that the half has not been told, and that to all who care to pursue it on their own account a rich harvest remains yet unreaped. We are not going to begin with the time “when wild in woods the noble savage ran,” and homes were in caves and under the shade of green trees; our starting-point is to be the reign of Henry VIII., and our first article will embrace that reign and the reigns of Edward VI. and Queen Mary—in other words, from 1509 to 1558. In those far-back days many things were different from what they are now. There has been a great advance in material comfort. Our forefathers, no doubt, had just as much wit and wisdom as we have; but we can boast an advantage over them in possessing more of the conveniences of life. In that respect, at least, we are lucky to have been born so late. Let us not imagine, however, that they had a bad time of it, or were discontented or miserable because they had not everything just like us. People do not sigh after what they have never either seen or heard of. We really find happiness in our affections—not in our material surroundings, which are of secondary importance; and it is not unreasonable to conclude that, as human nature is always the same, these ancestors of ours enjoyed life in their way quite as much as we do.