the household with unwilling hands:  but few, indeed, enter the dairy.  All dislike the idea of manual labour, though never so slight.  Therefore they acquire a smattering of knowledge, and go out as governesses.  They earn but a small stipend in that profession, because they have rarely gone through a sufficiently strict course of study themselves.  But they would rather live with strangers, accepting a position which is often invidious, than lift a hand to work at home, so great is the repugnance to manual labour.  These, again, have no domestic knowledge (beyond that of teaching children), none of cooking, or general household management.  If they marry a tenant farmer of their own class, with but small capital, they are too often a burden financially.  Whence comes this intense dislike to hand work—­this preference for the worst paid head work?  It is not confined, of course, to the gentler sex.  No more striking feature of modern country life can be found.

You cannot blame these girls, whether poor or moderately well-to-do, for thinking of something higher, more refined and elevating than the cheese-tub or the kitchen.  It is natural, and it is right, that they should wish to rise above that old, dull, dead level in which their mothers and grandmothers worked from youth to age.  The world has gone on since then—­it is a world of education, books, and wider sympathies.  In all this they must and ought to share.  The problem is how to enjoy the intellectual progress of the century and yet not forfeit the advantages of the hand labour and the thrift of our ancestors?  How shall we sit up late at night, burning the midnight oil of study, and yet rise with the dawn, strong from sweet sleep, to guide the plough?  One good thing must be scored down to the credit of the country girls of the day.  They have done much to educate the men.  They have shamed them out of the old rough, boorish ways; compelled them to abandon the former coarseness, to become more gentlemanly in manner.  By their interest in the greater world of society, literature, art, and music (more musical publications probably are now sold for the country in a month than used to be in a year), they have made the somewhat narrow-sighted farmer glance outside his parish.  If the rising generation of tenant farmers have lost much of the bigoted provincial mode of thought, together with the provincial pronunciation, it is undoubtedly due to the influence of the higher ideal of womanhood that now occupies their minds.  And this is a good work to have accomplished.

CHAPTER X

MADEMOISELLE, THE GOVERNESS