One old woman even went so far as to nail up a text as a finishing touch, “Thou God seest me”—most embarrassing to a Victorian child who had been taught that no one must even see her approach the door.

In other such places health and sanitary maxims were scrawled with lead pencil or yellow chalk on the whitewashed walls. Most of them embodied sound sense and some were expressed in sound verse, but few were so worded as to be printable. One short and pithy maxim may pass: “Eat well, work well, sleep well, and — well once a day.”

On the wall of the “little house” at Laura’s home pictures cut from the newspapers were pasted. These were changed when the walls were whitewashed and in succession they were “The Bombardment of Alexandria”, all clouds of smoke, flying fragments, and flashes of explosives; “Glasgow’s Mournful Disaster: Plunges for Life from the Daphne,” and “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” with the end of the train dangling from the broken bridge over a boiling sea. It was before the day of Press photography and the artists were able to give their imagination full play. Later, the place of honour in the “little house” was occupied by “Our Political Leaders”, two rows of portraits on one print; Mr. Gladstone, with hawk-like countenance and flashing eyes, in the middle of the top row, and kind, sleepy-Looking Lord Salisbury in the other. Laura loved that picture because Lord Randolph Churchill was there. She thought he must be the most handsome man in the world.

At the back or side of each cottage was a lean-to pigsty and the house refuse was thrown on a nearby pile called “the muck’ll”. This was so situated that the oozings from the sty could drain into it; the manure was also thrown there when the sty was cleared, and the whole formed a nasty, smelly eyesore to have within a few feet of the windows. “The wind’s in the so-and-so,” some woman indoors would say, “I can smell th’ muck’ll,” and she would often be reminded of the saying, “Pigs for health,” or told that the smell was a healthy one.