riotous; but the immorality cannot be gainsaid. No specific cure for this state of things can be devised: it must slowly work itself out under the gradual pressure of an advancing social state. It will be slow; for, up to the present, the woman has had but a small share of the benefit that has befallen the labourer through higher wages. If higher wages mainly go for drink, the wife at home is not much the better. The women say themselves they are no better off. If the girl at eighteen or twenty--in most agricultural marriages the girls are very young--is fortunate enough to have placed her faith in a man who redeems his word, then comes the difficulty of the cottage and the furniture to fill it. Cottages are often difficult to find, especially anywhere near a man's work, which is the great object. The furniture required is not much, but there must be some. The labourer does not deal much with the town furniture-dealer. A great deal of the furniture in cottages has been picked up at the sales of farmers on quitting their tenancies. Such are the old chairs, the formal sideboards and eight-day clocks standing in tall, square oaken cases by the staircase in the cottage. Such, too, are the great wooden bedsteads of oak or maple upstairs; and from the same source come the really good feather-beds and blankets. The women--especially the elder women--go to great trouble, and pinch themselves, to find a way of purchasing a good bed, and set no small pride upon it. These old oaken bedsteads, and sideboards, and chairs have perhaps been in the farmhouse for three or four generations, and are at last sold because the final representative of the family is imbued with modern ideas, and quits farming for trade. The cottagers always attend sales like this, and occasionally get hold of good bargains, and so it is that really good substantial furniture may often be found in the possession of the better class of labourers. The old people accumulate these things, and when their sons or daughters marry, can generally spare a few chairs, a bedstead and bed, and with a little crockery from other relations, and a few utensils bought in the adjacent town, the cottage is furnished sufficiently well for a couple whose habits are necessarily simple. After marriage the hard work of the woman's life really begins--work compared with which her early experience at home is nothing; and many, if they have left situations in farmhouses, deeply regret the change. The labourer can hardly be expected to feel the more exalted sentiments; and if in the upper classes even it is said that romance ends with marriage, it is doubly, literally true of the agricultural poor. In addition to her household work, she has to labour in the fields, or to wash--perhaps worse than the former alternative; and after a while her husband, too commonly wearying of his home, in which he finds nothing but a tired woman and troublesome children, leaves her for the public-house, and consumes