In figure this woman is slim, too narrow across the hips, too flat in the chest. And she grows thinner with years. The number of lean, pale women of this type in Hampshire is very remarkable. You see them in every village, women that appear almost fleshless, with a parchment-like skin drawn tight over the bones of the face, pale-blue, washed-out eyes, and thin, dead-looking hair. What is the reason of this leanness? It may be that the women of this blonde type are more subject to poverty of blood than others; for the men, though often thin, are not so excessively thin as the women. Or it may be the effect of that kind of poison which cottage women all over the country are becoming increasingly fond of, and which is having so deleterious an effect on the people in many counties--the tea they drink. Poison it certainly is: two or three cups a day of the black juice which they obtain by boiling and brewing the coarse Indian teas at a shilling a pound which they use, would kill me in less than a week.
Or it may be partly the poison of tea and partly the bad conditions, especially the want of proper food, in the villages. One day on the downs near Winchester I found a shepherd with his flock, a man of about fifty, and as healthy and strong-looking a fellow as I have seen in Hampshire. Why was it, I asked him, that he was the only man of his village I had seen with the colour of red blood in his face? why did they look so unwholesome generally? why were the women so thin, and the children so stunted { 227} and colourless? He said he didn't know, but thought that for one thing they did not get enough to eat. "On the farm where I work," he said, "there are twelve of us--nine men, all married, and three boys. My wages are thirteen shillings, with a cottage and garden; I have no children, and I neither drink nor smoke, and have not done so for eighteen years. Yet I find the money is not too much. Of the others, the eight married men all have children--one has got six at home: they all smoke, and all make a practice of spending at least two evenings each week at the public-house." How, after paying for beer and tobacco, they could support their families on the few shillings that remained out of their wages was a puzzle to him.