Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/145

 and scaring the crows and sparrows. The missus, too, earned a little in harvest time, and betwixt us all we managed, though God knows how, just to live, and to keep ourselves warm, though not too warm, I can assure you. Didn't the children go to school? Well, to the Sunday school, and in winter now and then to the day school: but you see we could not spare them for the better part of the year; for as soon as they growed up to be eight or nine they could earn summat, however small, if it were only picking up sticks in the woods and road side to help to light the fire. It wasn't much as they learned at the Sunday school, only reading; no writing or ciphering—just about as much as I learned when I was a boy. I can read a little. I read the Bible and the newspaper sometimes, but I can't write, and I don't understand newspapers much, except the murders, the robberies, the fires, and such like. The missus can write a bit, and tried to teach me; but I was too old to larn, and never could make nothing on it. She taught Tom, our oldest boy, to write, and Jane, our oldest girl; but the children came on so fast after a time, and she had so much to do with managing them and mending their clothes and screwing and scraping to feed them that she had to give up teaching. I kept my health and strength wonderfully well—the Lord be praised. I think that if I could have earned twenty-four shillings a week instead of twelve I should have been happy enough in good seasons. Did I never think of going to America? Well, I dare say I may have done. They say there's plenty of land there, and few men—just the revarse of what there is here; but how was I to get to America, I should like to know? I could not save a penny in a year, and it would have cost a matter of forty pounds, I have heerd, to pay our passage out. Forty pounds! You might as well come upon me for forty millions, or ask me to pay the national debt! No; it was of no use for me to think of America, and besides, even if I had the money, I was too old to go to America when I first heerd on it. It's too late in the day at fifty-six years of age to go to a new country, and to a new people. I think my eldest boy, Tom, would have gone with his wife and children if he had had money enough; but it was the same with him as with me. He got married like a fool, as his father was before him, when he was barely twenty; but not being of such a good constitution as me, he couldn't stand the work and the trouble as I did; and though he's only fifty now, he's an older man nor I am at seventy. He's got eight children, and one of them's a born idiot and another a cripple. It's hard times for him, I think; and if anything should happen to him the whole family would have to go to the workhouse. Any more of my children married? Yes. My oldest daughter. She was a tidy girl, and a pretty girl too, and got into service at the vicar's. She had good wages, and a good place—plenty to eat and drink, and all her money her own to buy clothes and ribbons with, and sometimes at Christmas a pound to spare to help her poor old father and mother through the winter. But she did not know when she was well off. She would go and get married, after she had been only three years in service, to a fellow as I never could bear—a jobbing gardener, who is a good deal too fond of his beer and bad company to make a good husband. She's never known what it was to be comfortable since her marriage, and wishes she was back again in service, with a shilling to spare for a ribbon now and then. But she has no shilling and no ribbon, nor is likely to have. How many grandchildren have I? Well, I think there have been more than forty of them, but a good many of 'em are dead—died young, and I do sometimes think that if all the children that are born into the world lived and growed up to be men and women that there wouldn't be half room enough in the world for 'em, leastways not in England and in our parish. You say it's wrong for the poor to marry in this thoughtless manner. Well, perhaps it is. I don't say it isn't; but it's about the only comfort the poor have got, though the comfort always brings sorrow along with it, and most things do in this world as far as I know on. It would be rather hard lines if the birds and the butterflies might mate, and men and women might not unless they were rich and had a hundred and fifty pounds a year, and were squires, and dukes, and such like. The missus? Aye, she's been dead more 'an ten years now—rest her soul; an' if she had been alive I should not a gone into the workhouse to be separated from her, but have got an out-door allowance, and managed somehow to toddle down to the grave alongside of her. She was a good woman she was, and sorely tried, and wears I hope a crown of glory on her head in heaven at this moment. 'Blessed are the poor in spirit,' says our