three to the great benefit of our poor neighbours.

Not, however, to the satisfaction of those who had hitherto leant most
upon the charity of the Hall. A certain picturesquely tattered man,
living at some distance from the village, who was in the habit of
waylaying my father at certain points on the estate, with well-timed
agricultural remarks and a cunning affectation of half-wittedness and
good-humour, got henceforward no half-crowns for his pains.

"Mrs. Bundle has knocked off all my pensioners," my father would
laughingly complain. But he was quite willing that the half-crowns
should now be taken direct to the man's wife and children, instead of
passing from his hands to the public-house. "Though really the good
woman--for I understand she is a most excellent person--is singularly
hard-favoured," my father added, "and looks more as if she thrashed
old Ragged Robin than as if he beat her, as I hear he does."

"Nothing inside, and the poker outside, makes a many women as they've
no wish to sit for their picter," said Mrs. Bundle, severely, in reply
to some remark of mine, reflecting, like my father's, on the said
woman's appearance. "And when a woman has children, and their father
brings home nothing but kicks and bad language, in all reason if it
isn't the death or the ruin of her, it makes her as she 'asn't much
time nor spirits to spare for dropping curtseys and telling long tales
like some people as is always scrap-seeking at gentry's back-doors.
But I knows a clean place when I takes it unawares, and clothes with
more patch than stuff, and all the colour washed out of them, and
bruises hid, and a bad husband made the best of, and children as knows
how to behave themselves."

The warmth of Mrs. Bundle's feelings only prompted me to tease her;
and it was chiefly for "the fun of working her up" that I said--

"Ah, but, Nurse, you know we heard she went after him one night to the
public-house, and made a row before everybody. I don't mean he ought
to go to the public-house, but still, I'm sure if I'd a wife who came
and hunted me up when she thought I ought to be indoors, I'd--well,
I'd try and teach her to stay at home. Besides, women ought to be
gentle, and perhaps if she were sweeter-tempered with him, he'd be
kinder to her."

"Do you know what she went for, Master Reginald?" said Nurse Bundle.
"Not a halfpenny does he give her to feed the children with, and
everything in that house that's got she gets by