town to their place of work.

Sometimes they have time to return home at 8 or 8.30 a.m. for a second
hurried 'breakfast,' which as often as not is their first, for many of
them start the day's work on an empty stomach. Those who cannot run home
and back in the half-hour usually allowed for the first 'Schaft,' or
meal-time, take their bread-and-butter with them in a cotton or linen bag,
and their milk-and-water or coffee in a tin, and so shift as well as they
can. Dinner-time, as a rule, finds the whole family united from about
twelve until one o'clock or half-past in the kitchen at home. This kitchen
is, of course, used for cooking, washing, dwelling, and sleeping purposes.
The walls are whitewashed, and the floor consists of flag-stones. Of
luxury there is none, of comfort little. Generally the fare of the day is
potatoes, with some vegetable, carrots, turnips, cabbage, or beans. A
piece of bacon, rarely some beef, is sometimes added; while mutton is
hardly ever eaten in Holland, unless by very poor people. Fish is too
expensive for most of them, except fried kippers or bloaters. If there is
time over, and the house has a little garden attached to it, the children
help by watering the vegetables growing there, should it be summer-time,
or by making themselves generally useful. But at 1 or 1.30 they have to be
back at the workshop, and until 7 p.m. the drudgery goes on again. On
Saturday evening the boy brings his sixpence, or whatever his trifling
wages may be, to his mother. Rent and the club-money for illness and
funeral expenses must be at hand when the collectors call either on Sunday
or Monday morning. As a rule, though the exceptions are numerous enough,
the father also brings his whole pay with him; but drink is the curse--a
decreasing curse, it may be, but still a curse--of many a workman's
family, and in such cases the inroads it makes in the domestic budget are
very serious.