Page:Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey (1st edition), Volume 3 (Agnes Grey).djvu/19

Rh dismissed. Our clothes were mended, turned, and darned to the utmost verge of decency; our food, always plain, was now simplified to an unprecedented degree—except my father's favorite dishes: our coals and candles were painfully economised—the pair of candles reduced to one, and that most sparingly used: the coals carefully husbanded in the half empty grate, especially when my father was out on his parish duties, or confined to bed through illness—then we sat with our feet on the fender, scraping the perishing embers together from time to time, and occasionally adding a slight scattering of the dust and fragments of coal, just to keep them alive. As for our carpets, they in time, were worn threadbare, and patched and darned even to a greater extent than our garments. To save the expense of a gardener, Mary and I undertook to keep the garden in order; and all the cooking and household work, that could not easily be managed by one servant girl, was done by my mother and sister, with a little occasional help from me—only a little, because, though a woman in my own estimation, I was still a child in theirs; and my mother like most active, managing women, was not gifted with very