180 THE WIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. they went. They lived there seven years — years of alternating depression and good cheer to Carlyle, but marked by improvement in his literary power and growing reputation. To his wife they were years of desolation. As only incapable Scottish servants could be obtained, Mrs. Carlyle was obliged to make good their deficiencies. She cooked, cleaned the rooms, scoured the floors, polished grates, milked cows, gathered eggs, looked after the gar- den, took charge of the dairy, and, in short, did the work herself, with occasional assistance from her blundering maid. If anything was unexpectedly required from the village, it was she who must mount and gallop away in quest of it. Her hardest struggles were with the cookery. She had cooked, indeed, at Comely Bank, but only now and then the dainties, not as she cooked at Craigenputtock. After thirty years, she wrote to a friend the comic-pathetic story of the baking of her first loaf of bread. The bread from Dumfries not agreeing with her husband, she says : " It was plainly my duty as a Christian wife to bake at home. So I sent for Cobbett's ' Cottage Economy,' and fell to work at a loaf of bread. But knowing nothing of the process of fermentation or the heat of ovens, it came to pass that my loaf got put into the oven at the time that myself ought to have been put into bed ; and I remained the only person not asleep in a house in the middle of a desert. One o'clock struck, and then two, and then three ; and still I was sitting there in an immense solitude, my whole body aching with weariness, my heart aching with a sense of forlornness and degra- dation. That I, who had been so petted at home, whose comfort had been studied by everybody in the house, who had never been required to do anything but cultivate my mind, should have to pass all those hours of the night in watching a loaf of bread — which mightn't turn out bread
