Very early in the morning, before daybreak for the greater part of the year, the men would throw on their clothes, breakfast on bread and fat, snatch the dinner baskets which had been packed for them overnight, and hurry off across the fields to the farm. Getting the boys off was a more difficult matter. Mothers would have to call and shake and sometimes pull boys of eleven or twelve out of their warm beds in a winter morning. Most of the young and those in the prime of life were thickset, red-faced men of good medium height and enormous strength, who prided themselves on the weights they could carry and boasted of never having had an ache nor a pain in their lives. The elders stooped, had gnarled and swollen hands and, walked badly, for they felt the effects of a life spent out of doors in all weathers and of the rheumatism which tried most of them. They still spoke the dialect, in which the vowels were not only broadened, but in many words doubled. Boy was 'boo-oy,' cola 'coo-al' and so on. In other words, syllables were slurred and words were run together, as 'brenbu'er' for bread and butter. They had hundreds of proverbs and sayings and their talk was stiff with simile. Nothing was ever simply hot, cold or colored; it was 'as hot as hell, as cold as ice, as green as grass' or 'as yellow as a guinea'. To be nervy was to be 'like a cat on hot bricks'; to be angry , 'mad as a bull', or any one might be 'poor as a rat', 'sick as a dog' , 'as ugly as sin' , 'full of the milk of human kindness', or 'stinking with pride' . The men's incomes were the same to a penny (ten shillings a week); their circumstances, pleasures, and their daily field work were shared in common but in themselves they differed, as other men of their day differed, in country and town. Some were intelligent, others slow in the uptake, some were kind and helpful, others selfish. A stranger would not have found the dry humor of the Scottish peasant, or the racy wit and wisdom of Thomas Hardy's Wessex. These men's minds were east in a heavier mould and moved more slowly. Yet there were occasional gleams of quiet fun. When Edmund was crying because his pet magpie had flown away one man told him to go and tell Mrs. Andrews about it (she was the village gossip) 'and you'll soon know where she's been seen.' Their favorite virtue was endurance. Not to flinch from pain or hardship was their ideal. A young woman would say to the midwife after her first confinement, 'I didn't flinch, did I? Oh, I do hope I didn't flinch', and a man would tell how he had taken a piece of fence to fight off a charging bull, and not he but the bull had 'flinched.' Most of the younger men were ______.