shilling." In the northern half of the Wold district, where the farms are often of 800 or 1000 acres, the villages, though numerous, are so small that there is only one room for the regularly-hired labourers; the large class of "catch-work" men, with their wives and families, have to herd where they can. In the Fen district it is even worse. The population is crowded into small villages standing close to the high road, while the parishes stretch miles away into the Fen, and in consequence the labourer has to walk in some cases five or six miles to his work. "At Baston," a few miles from Market Deeping, "a man had for many years walked 56 miles a week to and from his work, and all for twelve shillings. At Langtoft, two miles from Baston, a man was found living in a miserable house of three rooms, with his wife, her mother, and five children. The bedroom was a garret, the wall's of which, leaning to, formed a ridge at the top, with a dormer window in front. 'Did he live there to be near his work?' 'No, men have to trail a long way to work. The man was working in Braceboro', six miles from home, and came back to his family every night! He lived there because he could get a tenantable cot, and was glad of it at any price, anywhere, and in any condition.'"
The Lincolnshire cottages are not as a rule bad in quality, although in one parish a farmer speaks of some as "not fit to put a pig in," but their insufficient quantity is the cause of evils quite as destructive of home life, and perhaps more so. Over crowding, of course, is one of the first results, with all its deleterious consequences. A girl belonging to a family of nine children was asked "how they all got into one small bedroom," and she replied "that they had to lie like pins, heads and tails, next each other." In Grainthorpe a case was reported to the Board of Guardians, in which the father and mother and seven children were found in a room with only one bedstead, all ill of fever, no window except one in the roof. At Easttoft the incumbent writes:—"Some cottages here are dreadfully crowded, especially by the Irish. I know a case where a farmer had to send for a labourer earlier than usual, and his foreman, when he went to the cottage, could not open the door, the whole cottage being covered with sleeping people packed close together."
