Leading Articles on Various Subjects — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Leading Articles on Various Subjects
John Stuart Mill · en
the hill, a little to the eastward, the dark blue of the German Ocean
was clearly visible. It must have been a cheerful spot in the clear
sunny days of summer, when even heaths and moors look gay--when
the deep blue of the hills seems as if softening its tints to
harmonize with the deep blue of the sky--when the hum of the bee is
heard amid the heath, and the lark high overhead. But it must have
been a gloomy and miserable solitude on that night when the
husband of Annie lay tossing in mortal agony, and no neighbour
near to counsel or assist, her weeping children around her, and with
neither lamp nor candle in the cottage. It was only by the 'light
of a burning coal taken from the fire, and exchanged for another as
the flame waxed faint, that she was enabled to watch the progress
of the fatal malady, and to tell at what time death set his
unalterable seal on the pallid features of her husband.'
Long years of incessant labour followed; her children were young and
helpless, and her aged mother still with her. She removed to another
cottage, where she rented an acre or two of land, that enabled her to
keep a cow, and gave her opportunity, as the place was situated beside
a considerable stream, of earning a small income as a bleacher of
home-made linen. The day, and not unfrequently the night, was spent in
toil; but she was strengthened to endure, and so her children were
bred up in hardy independence. 'During the weeks of harvest,' says her
biographer, 'she was engaged as a reaper by the farmer from whom she
rented her little tenement; and when her day's work was done, while
her fellow-labourers retired to rest, she employed herself in reaping
her own crops, or providing grass for the cow, and often continued her
toil by the light of the harvest moon till it was almost midnight.
After a number of years thus spent, the expiration of the farmer's
lease occasioned her removal. Her family were now grown up; she could
afford, in consequence, to have recourse to means of subsistence
which, if more scanty, were less laborious than those which she had
plied so long; and so, removing to a neighbouring village, she earned
a livelihood for herself and her infirm mother by spinning carpet
worsted at twopence a-day, the common wages for a woman at that
period.' 'The cottage which she now occupied,' we again quote,
'happened to be one of a number which the Countess of Leven charitably
kept for the accommodation of poor people who were unable to pay a
rent. She, however, considered that she had no right to reckon herself
among this class, so long as it should please God to afford her
strength to provide for her own necessities; and therefore she deemed
it unjustifiable to deprive the truly indigent of what had been
intended exclusively for them. Influenced by these motives, she
removed at the next term to an adjacent hamlet, and here her aged
mother died.' We need not minutely follow her after-course: it bore
but one complexion to the end.