Bystanders would call the agricultural labourer cruel. Carters, for instance, had till lately a habit of knocking the boys under their control about in a brutal manner. But I do not think that in the mass of cases it arose from deliberate cruelty, but from a species of stolid indifference or insensibility to suffering. Somehow they do not seem to understand that others suffer, whether this arises from the rough life they lead, the endless battle with the weather, the hard fare--whether it has grown up out of the circumstances surrounding them. The same unfeeling brutality often extends to the cattle under their care. In this there has been a decided improvement of late years; but it is not yet extinct. These are some of the lights and shades of the labourer's daily life impartially presented. _FIELD-FARING WOMEN._ If a thoughtful English peasant-woman rejoiced that in her house a son was born, it would be, not because "she had gotten a man from the Lord," but a thanksgiving that it was not a girl. That most natural thanksgiving of the Hebrew woman is too rarely heard in the rural cottage, situated though it may be in the midst of meadows and fields abounding with the fat of the earth. The fact that a fresh being has entered upon life, with all its glorious possibilities, is not a subject for joy. "Well, John," the farmer says to his man, "your wife has been confined, hasn't she? How's the young one?" "Aw, sir, a' be main weak and picked, an' like _to go back_--thank God!" replies the labourer with intense satisfaction, especially if he has two or three children already. "Picked" means thin, sharp-featured, wasted, emaciated. "To go back" is to die. The man does not like to say "die," therefore he puts it "to go back"--_i.e._, whence it came; from the unknown. Yet, with all this hard indifference, the labourer is as fond of his children as any one else. The "ego" that utters those apparently heartless words is not the real man, it is the "ego" produced by long experience of the hardships of poverty; of coarse fare, rude labour, exposure. After all, it is in a spirit of tenderness towards the infant that the parent half desires it to die. The real "ego," the true man, delights as all humanity does in watching the growth of the tiny limbs, the expansion of the instincts into mind, and the first employment of that mind. He feels as Marguerite in _Faust_ felt, tending the babe--"the holiest of all joys." But life is very, very hard, and circumstances push him out of himself. Still more do these hardships tell upon his wife; and so it is, knowing what her sex have to go through, that she welcomes a boy more than a girl. An aged agricultural woman said she would sooner have seven boys than one girl; for the former, when they became lads, went out and earned their own living, but the girls you never knew when they were got rid of--they were always coming back. This expressed the practical view of the matter. But