Page:The railway children (IA railwaychildren00nesb 1).pdf/306

 you their names—they were Clara and Ethelwyn), but they did not seem to want Mrs. Viney, and they told Mother that she was an old muddler. So Mrs. Viney only came two days a week to do washing and ironing. Then Clara and Ethelwyn said they could do the work all right if they weren't interfered with, and that meant that the children no longer got the tea and cleared it away and washed up the tea-things and dusted the rooms.

This would have left quite a blank in their lives, although they had often pretended to themselves and to each other that they hated housework. But now that Mother had no writing and no housework to do, she had time for lessons. And lessons the children had to do. However nice the person who is teaching you may be, lessons are lessons all the world over, and at their best are worse fun than peeling potatoes or lighting a fire.

On the other hand, if Mother now had time for lessons, she also had time for play, and to make up little rhymes for the children as she used to do. She had not had much time for rhymes since she came to Three Chimmeys.

There was one very odd thing about these lessons. Whatever the children were doing, they always wanted to be doing something else. When