At harvest-time, however, it is inhabited--full to overflowing.

A few decades ago as many as fifty labourers engaged for the harvest had to be housed in the farm out-houses on beds of straw.

There was no help for it, and men and women had to congregate in these barns together.
Up as early as five in the morning, they were generally dead tired by night; and, miserable though this system of herding them together was, they took it like stoics, and their very number served as a moral safeguard.

Nowadays the harvest is gathered in so quickly, and machinery does so much that used to be done by hand, that this crowding of labourers together, which was the bothy system at its worst, is nothing like what it was.

As many as six or eight men, however, are put up in the garret referred to during "hairst"-time, and the female labourers have to make the best of it in the barn.