“The treatment’s not overgrand at the workhouse, and they’re not overfed there either, and they get no beer or other liquors. Then the men and women, except the older people, are all separated. A man would never see his wife there, only by chance in the yard. The preachers say, ‘What God bath joined together, let no man put asunder—; but they don’t pay much attention to that saying at the workhouse.”

This discourse of the shoemaker’s made me eager to see some paupers for myself, and a few days later I had the chance. It was on the occasion of a picnic given to the workhouse folk by a gentleman of a neighboring village. The paupers numbered thirty or forty, the men in dark caps and white smock-frocks, and the women in blue gowns and white aprons. They were very neat, yet they had a bleached-out, broken-down look, as if capacity and energy were pretty well gone. It was a look very different from the tough, knotty brownness of the old men still at work in the fields. I was told that one reason for the antipathy of the poor to the workhouse is that there a person is compelled to keep clean and be regular in his habits. Cleanliness is a bugbear, and it is a common saying when a man is entering- the workhouse, “Well, he won’t last long. They’ll soon wash him to death when he gets there.”

The gentleman who entertained the paupers in his park had them brought from the workhouse in several wagons arched over with greens, and, at the foot of his lawn he put up a big tent in which was spread a grand feast.