boots. Altogether, these young women, when engaged at their ordinary avocations by the side of a spring, formed no unpicturesque subject for the sketcher's pencil, and might have been advantageously transferred to canvas by many an artist who travels to greater distances in search of lesser novelties. [1]
But many peculiar subjects for the pencil might there have been found. One day when they were all going to see the ewe-milking (which of itself would have furnished material for a host of sketches), they suddenly came upon the following scene. Round by the gable of a cottage was seated a shock-headed rustic Absalom, and standing over him was another rustic, who, with a large pair of shears, was acting as an amateur Tonson, and was earnestly engaged in reducing the other's profuse head of hair; an occupation upon which he busied himself with more zeal than discretion. Of this little scene Miss Patty Honeywood forthwith made a memorandum.
For Miss Patty possessed the enviable accomplishment of sketching from nature; and, leaving the beaten track of young-lady figure-artists, who usually limit their efforts to chalk-heads
- ↑ In north-Northumberland, farm-labourers are usually hired by the year—from Whitsunday to Whitsunday—and are paid mostly in kind,—so many bolls of oats, barley, and peas—so much flax and wheat—the keep of a cow, and the addition of a few pounds in money. Every hind or labourer is bound, in return for his house, to provide a woman-labourer to the farmer, for so much a day throughout the year—which is usually tenpence a day in summer, and eightpence in winter; and as it often happens that he has none of his own family fit for the work, he has to hire a woman, at large wages, to do it. As the demand is greater than the supply there is not always a strict inquiry into the "bondager's" character. As with the case of hop-pickers—whom these bondagers somewhat resemble both socially and morally—they are oftentimes the inhabitants of densely-populated towns, who are tempted to live a brief agricultural life, not so much from the temptation of the wages, as from the desire to pass a summer-time in the country.
