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The damage was made good with wifely pins as far as possible, and we proceeded to look for the house which we were that day pursuing.

A large and elaborate butler received us at the door, and we became aware that the house, so far from being "taken care of," was full of visitors, each one of whom looked to me to be trimmer and tidier than the last. A cricket match was being played on the ground in front of the house, and half the county was there to look on.

I had recklessly left my coat in the car it was too hot to keep it on, and my one chance was to keep my face to the enemy. In agony In agony I slid round the walls of that house. "There, they have just begun to play," said the lady of the house, who was showing us round. "H'm, er, yes," said I, looking nervously over my shoulder, as I stood with my back to the light, "who did you say painted that very remarkable picture over the fireplace?" At last my wife could keep the secret no longer, and explained the state of affairs to our guide. When she had stopped laughing, the good lady was all sympathy; and presently I was once more at my ease in a pair of flannels belonging to her husband. After that I avoided stiles, and did my roadside repairs in gloves and overalls.

Houses of all ages, of all sizes, did we see. We had a hankering after the Elizathe Elizabethan-grey gables and mul

lioned windows; and indeed there there is nothing better, but our Tudor forefathers never considered that servants would one day want good rooms and an occasional wash. Where the servants did sleep in one or two old manor-houses we looked at was a mystery. Perhaps they herded in the passages or slept in the cellar.

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The estate agent showed us over one beautiful old house which had a reputation for ghosts. He may merely have been attempting to elongate our nether limbs, but he said that in the beautiful corridorlibrary strange things had more than once happened to him. "There is a dog there," he said, "which whines and gets up as you go into the room. If you follow it, you see it up to this spot," he pointed to the oak wainscotting,-" where it disappears.' Had the wainscotting ever been opened? "Yes; there was a hollow cupboard just at the place, and a dog's skeleton inside. I have seen the animal three or four times," he said. "Then, do you see that picture, there is a mark on the forehead, which was done by a revolver-bullet. Mr Dash, who had the house on a lease, thought for a long time that some one was playing the fool here, and gave notice that he would carry a revolver and use it if necessary. One night before going to bed he walked through here quietly, and fired at thing or some one, without doing any damage except to

some

the Vandyck." We agreed it was all very interesting, but we did not make an offer for the house. Perhaps no offer was what the agent wanted.

Another house had a rightof-way to the church through the garden, under the drawingroom windows: a little pressure revealed the fact that all the funerals went by this path.

In another case the house was so near the church wall that there was but bare room to walk between them.

Gradually we drifted farther west in our seeking. Neither Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire,

nor Wiltshire could give us what we wanted, and at last we came to a fair county of red earth and green banks and winding lanes, of great moorlands and bleak hillsides, where the folk speak in a kind and lazy dialect, and the cows are the colour of the soil which bears them. Wind there is, from the north and west, and much rain, but the air is soft and gracious, and if you wish for refuge from the gales and a warm winter air, you can turn you to the south, and find a haven at Budleigh, or Sidmouth, or Torbay. Our house is built high up under Exmoor, 'twixt sea and sea, twenty odd miles away from either, a thousand feet above them both, and we can see over half the world, or so my little son believes. Our nearest neighbours are miles away, save for my good friend the parson, and here we can live out our lives, doing some little good, I hope, and small harm at any rate;

if not the world forgetting— and that is a danger to be guarded against, as I think— at least not reminded at every turn of its ramping and its roaring, of its bricks and its trains, its noise and its sights and its smells. By the world forgot? Once I dabbled a little in the big world and had my small successes-fought a constituency, or wrote a book, or something-what does it matter?-and received the compliments of the Men who Count. Now I have drunk of the waters of Lethe, and all that strenuous life is as a babble of the waves which you hear half asleep through the ship's strong side, when you lie in your berth at night. It is pleasant to hear the wind roaring overhead, and to know that you are snug and warm and safe.

There was no public-house in the village when we came here. There was a building which once had been one, but a former squire shut it upwhether out of zeal for temperance or because he wanted the house for other purposes I know not. In any case the result was bad. Cheap spirits, consumed at home, did duty for the beer, drunk openly, so far as the small farmers and better-paid employés were concerned. The labourers, unable to get their glass of an evening, saved up their pence and had a regular Saturday night of it at the public-house in the next village, three miles away, lying drunk in a barn or in the open when it was warm, staggering home somehow when it was wet or cold. I do not

mean to say that every man in the place took to cheap whisky or a weekly "drunk," but careful investigation proved quite clearly that in very many instances this had been the result.

Perhaps the ardent Temperance man would say that if the squire in the next village also had shut up his public-house, or had had it shut up for him, the trouble would have been cured, so far as the labourers were concerned. But it is wonderful what a long way some men will walk for a glass of beer: the town is only six miles away, and it has never yet been proposed, so far as I know, to close every publichouse in the country. And anyhow you cannot get over the cheap and nasty spirits.

It seemed good to me to reopen the public, but to call it a club, and as far as possible to run it on the lines of a club. We had meetings about it in the school, elected a Committee, and drew up a long list of rules. I engaged a just-retired Chief Writer R.N. to act as Steward, who puts in his mornings as clerk in the estate office under the Agent, and rules the Club members with a naval discipline. We started with sixty members, have now nearly eighty-practically every man in the parish-and, save for the Steward's wages, the Club is entirely self-supporting, and has a good balance at the bank. The preamble to the rules avers that the object of the Club is to promote social intercourse, mental and moral improvement, and rational

VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO, MCXXXVII,

amusement: I am not sure about the mental or moral improvement, but they certainly manage to amuse themselves. An upper room would just take an old billiard-table which I had to dispose of; they play on it till closing time, and are very keen about whist, cribbage, and other card games. Bridge has not penetrated yet; and as one of the rules of the Club is that gambling is not allowed, there is no particular reason why it should be played.

Another important rule is to the effect that not more than three glasses of beer or cider shall be sold to any member in one day. Although many men can consume more than a pint and a half of beer without any ill effects, yet 3d. a day is quite as much as a labourer on 158. to 20s. a week ought to spend on this form of joy, when he has a family to feed. Of course, attempts are made at times to get to windward of this rule; but the Steward is wily, and I do not think that they often impose upon him.

The house is open from 4.30 to 9.30 every day, except Saturdays, when the hours are 2.30 to 10. There was rather a fight over this rule between the farmers and the labourers : the farmers, knowing how hard it is to get their men out of bed of a morning, wanted the Club closed earlier; the men, thinking of the time it takes to clean themselves and get supper after a day's work, did not want their evenings curtailed. The hours in force are the result of a compromise. Meals can be

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obtained, and all manner of temperance drinks; and there is a considerable expenditure on newspapers. The subscription is 6d. a-month, and lads under seventeen are not eligible for election-election is the work of the Committee. Powers of Veto are reserved by the President myself; but they will not, I think, ever have to be used, so much good sense has been shown by members and Committee alike. I propose to continue to pay the Steward's wages, as it seems to me important that he should be answerable to me for any offences he may commit, rather than to the Committee.

A short time ago a Police Superintendent, giving evidence before the Divorce Commission, said that he thought the greatly increased numbers of Workmen's Clubs all over the country had something to do with the increase in the number of divorce suits, as

they took men away from home. It seemed to be a new idea to the Commission, and they questioned him closely about his statement. Of course a great many so-called clubs are nothing but drink-shops, where men can fuddle themselves under rather more comfortable conditions than obtain in the average public. But I cannot believe that a properly conducted club is likely to lead to quarrels between man and wife. If the woman is fond enough of her husband, and can look after him well enough to keep him at home when his work is done, he will stay at home. If for any reason (bad

cooking, squalling babies, a shrewish wife, a spring-cleaning, or mere boredom) he prefers to spend an evening out, out he will go, and it is better that he should go and play a game of cards at a respectable club than loaf about the bar of a public. There is an emphasis on the word respectable, and no few of the so-called Workmen's Clubs in our towns ought to be carefully watched by the police. The desire for a glass and a chat is one of the strongest things in the average man's nature, and will not be denied.

Another thing which seemed earnestly to require attention was the installation of a village Nurse. This meant more meetings, and teas for the farmers' wives. To our great surprise there was quite a strong opposition to the project, mainly on the good old grounds that there never had been one before. One good lady insisted that the labourers and their wives were too dirty in their habits for a nurse to have anything to do with for real biting contempt commend me to the feelings a farmer's wife entertains towards her husband's men. We tried to point out that part, and not the least important part, of a nurse's job would be to teach them to be cleaner.

But no, they were too piggish for anything, she said, and told us harrowing tales of disgusting complaints and worse remedies. It would appear that the Boer specific for most ills (warm manure) is not unknown in rural England. Another lady, who had had fourteen children herself, as

sured us that no more babies were ever going to be born in the parish: she knew it for a fact. Undeterred, however, by these dismalities, my wife made a personally conducted tour of the parish (no light task in this hilly, scattered district), and obtained promises from more than half the wives of the place that they would join the Nursing Association: 2s. 6d. a-year, and an extra fee under certain circumstances.

The nurse arrived, proved to be a strong country girl herself, possessed of much energy, and became an almost immediate success. Maternity -for the babies continue to arrive, in spite of our friend's warning-is not achieved under such appalling conditions as heretofore, and the infant now has at least a reasonable chance of surviving what some doctor has called "that first fatal fortnight." Fresh air, cold water, and disinfectants are the nurse's principal weapons, two of which cost nothing, and the third very little. Wounds and cuts are freely brought to her to be bandaged; the old remedies (which often led to blood-poisoning and the loss of limbs) are at a discount. Bedridden folk are made more comfortable, and malingerers occasionally detected. There was a man, not so old, who had been in bed for five years. Nurse said there was nothing the matter with him; nor was there, except sheer, stark laziness. He is doing a little work now, and is very much the better for it. The curious thing is that his family knew

perfectly well there was nothing amiss with him; but they were quite content to let him lie in bed and wait upon him.

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The relations between a village nurse and the doctors must of necessity be a little delicate. A man with a good practice is usually delighted at hearing that such-and-such a parish has formed a Nursing Association. "She saves me from being waked up in the middle of the night for a fivemile drive, only to find that the case is so far gone as to be quite hopeless. She saves me from the same drive, to be told at the end of it that Tommy has got a stomach ache. Some of the poor are very much given to calling in a doctor for nothing, especially where their appetite is concerned. If they don't fancy their food they think themselves in far worse case than if they have a torn limb or an open sore. A London HouseSurgeon told me this story the other day. He went to his receiving-room at the hospital and found there three men, an Englishman, a Scotchman, and an Irishman, all, so far as he could tell, sickening with influenza. In answer to his inquiries the Scotchman said, "Ma heid's bad"; the Irishman "I'm could wan minnit, an' hot the nex"; the Englishman, "I knew I must be ill, as I couldn't eat my breakfast."

A doctor who is a humane man (and I have never met one who was not, and do not think I ever shall) and has a fair practice, cannot but welcome the co-operation of a

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