Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/42

 tarred shed. A double bedstead, washstand, etc., and some chairs, also a mattress, palliasse, quilt and pillows, almost new, and tied up in a light, but good, reddish carpet, like a gigantic man-o'-warsman's bundle. The things were good, much better than was generally found in the cottages, and I took them, and started to get the Winder ready for the family. Higgins was told off to carry the things down and fix them up for me, for "being gents" we were supposed to be incapable. Higgins carried them all down on his head, and, looking at it now in an Australian Bush, and not from an English farm-labouring-village light, I think it was one of the cruellest loads that a man ever was called upon to carry.

There was, next the Bow Winders, on the outside, an old house of brick set in criss-cross beams, with rooms in the steep tiled roof, of course, and let to a painter, which house was older than the oldest inhabitant knew, and had been occupied by the Higginses in other and far better days. Before the Higginses were labourers to the Leonards. Days that have long gone out of England for ever.

Along towards Shepperton, some hundred yards or so from the end hutch of the village, was the village beerhouse—"beer-shop" they call it in London (they call things by their names)—with a low door that you stumbled in through, on to sanded floors, and under a low dark old ceiling, with the inevitable great beam, anywhere but in the centre. I stood outside that door late one night, after returning from London, and rapped at family bedroom window above—in the roof