a
serious one, a matter of some two-score pheasants and a desperate fight
with a gang. Looking at it as property, the squire had been merciful,
pleading with the magistrates for a mitigated penalty. The drunkenness
was habitual. In short, they were a bad lot--there was a name attached
to the whole family for thieving, poaching, drinking, and even worse.
Yet still there were two points that did sink deep into Smith's mind,
and made him pause several times that afternoon in his work. The first
was that long family of nineteen mouths, with the father and mother
making twenty-one. What a number of sins, in the rude logic of the
struggle for existence, that terrible fact glossed over! Who could
blame--what labourer at least could blame--the ragged, ill-clothed
children for taking the dead wood from the hedges to warm their naked
limbs? What labourer could blame the father for taking the hares and
rabbits running across his very path to fill that wretched hovel with
savoury steam from the pot? And further, what labourer could blame the
miserable old man for drowning his feelings, and his sensation of cold
and hunger, in liquor?

The great evil of these things is that a fellow-feeling will arise with
the wrong-doer, till the original distinction between right and wrong is
lost sight of entirely. John Smith had a family too. The other point was
the sixty years of labour and their fruit. After two generations of
hardest toil and rudest exposure, still dependent upon the seasons even
to permit him to work, when that work could be obtained. No rest, no
cosy fireside nook: still the bitter wind, and the half-frozen slime
and slush rising above the ankle. In an undefined way Smith had been
proud of his broad, enormous strength, and rocklike hardihood. He had
felt a certain rude pleasure in opening his broad chest to the winter
wind. But now he involuntarily closed his shirt and buttoned it. He did
not feel so confident in his own power of meeting all the contingencies
of the future.

Thought without method and without logical sequence is apt to press
heavily upon the uneducated mind. It was thus that these reflections
left a sensation of weight and discomfort upon Smith, and it was in a
worse humour than was common to his usually well-balanced organisation
that he hid away his tools under the bushes as the evening grew too dark
for work, and slowly paced homewards. He had some two miles to walk, and
he had long since begun to fee