the flood-bound party made the best of their way on horseback to a bridge, and reached home by a circuit of some thirty miles.
Incidents of this kind were a strange contrast to those of 1865, when we knew of people being obliged to send eight miles for water every washing day. When a river pool is within reasonable distance it is customary, in ordinary seasons, to convey the clothes to the water rather than the water to the clothes. A fire is then lighted on the water's edge, and a booth of green boughs erected for the washerwoman, beneath which she stands at her tubs, securely screened from the sun.
The inconvenience of occupying a residence where there was not only no water on the premises, but where the nearest well was quite two hundred yards distant, appeared overwhelming to us when we first took up our abode at Barladong. When I learned, however, that many of our poorer neighbours lived at a much greater distance than ourselves from a well, I found that the comfort of our position exceeded theirs in as great a degree as the conveniences of our own house were surpassed by those of an English one, where water is "laid-on" upon every floor.
The labour and loss of time in fetching and carrying water are not the only evils involved in distant wells. The much-frequented spring is, as Goethe well knew, the fountain-head of half the gossip in the neighbourhood, and the fact of the poet having been able (in his 'Faust') to transmute the chatter of village maidens into an immortal scene, gives no consolation to an unfortunate housewife distracted with waiting for her servant, who has been sent for a bucket of water and remains at the well talking idly with the
