Men and women were hospitable and ready to smile as the Welsh are; and they have an alluring naïveté as well as some righteousness. One family was excessively virtuous or had a wish to appear so: I do not know which alternative to like the less, since it was in a matter of game. They rented land on a large estate and had a right to the rabbits: the hares were sacred to the great landowner. The farmer’s wife assured me that one of her sons had lately brought in a lame hare and proposed to put it out of its pain, but that she had said: “No, take it out and let it die outside anywhere. The best thing is to be afraid in things of this kind and then you won’t go wrong.” Doing much the same kind or quantity of manual work as their husbands and being much out of doors, the women’s manners were confident and free. Their speech was as a rule fluent and grammatical and clearly delivered, with less accent than in any part of England. Coming into a mining village one day and wanting tea, I asked a woman who was drawing water from a farmyard well if she could make me some, thinking she was the farmer’s wife. She said she would, but took me to one of a small row of cottages over the way, where her husband was half-naked in the midst of his Saturday wash. Taking no notice of him she led me into the sitting-room and, with a huge loaf held like a violin, began buttering and cutting thin slices while she talked to me, to the little children and to her husband, from the adjacent kitchen. She was tall, straight as a pillar, black-haired, with clear untanned but slightly swarthy skin, black eyes, kindly gleaming cheeks and red lips smiling above her broad breast and hips. Her clothes were black but in rags that hardly clung to her shoulders and waist. She was barely five and twenty, but had six young children about her, one in a cradle by the hearth and another still crawling at her feet. Her only embarrassment came when I asked to pay for my tea--she began adding up the cost, a pennyworth of bread and butter, a halfpennyworth of tea, etc.! The kitchen consisted simply of a large grate and baking oven, plain tables and chairs on a flagged floor. But the sitting-room was a museum--with photographs of a volunteer corps, of friends and relations on the wall over the fire; foxgloves in jam-pots surrounded by green crinkled paper in the fireplace; on the mantelpiece, cheap little vases and scraps of ore and more photographs. On the walls were three pictures: one of two well-dressed children being timidly inspected by fallow deer; another of a grandmother showing a book to a child whose attention is diverted by the frolics of two kittens at her side; and a third of Jesus, bleeding and crowned with thorns, high on a cross over a marble city beneath a romantic forest ridge, behind which was the conflagration of a crimson sunset.