to himself, 'I
ain't so bad as that comes to'----

And then mercifully he became unconscious, for to go six miles with a
broken leg in a cart without springs on the way to the hospital is not
a joke, and the neighbours' kindly attempts to bring him round were
happily unsuccessful. The worst part of that drive fell to the share
of his wife, who sat holding his head on her lap as they jolted along,
trying to keep the jars and bumps from jerking his leg, though all the
time she firmly believed he was dead, and was already, in her dulled
mind, making pitiful little arrangements about mourning and the
funeral, and contemplating, with dreary equanimity, a widowed existence
with three-and-sixpence a week for her and Tom and Bill and Zoe to live
upon. She never left Zoe out of the calculation, even when it became
most difficult to adjust the number of mouths to be fed with the amount
of food to be put into them, and over this dark future fell the darker
shadow of the workhouse, which closes the vista of life to most of the
poor. No wonder they live entirely in the present, and shut their eyes
persistently to the future!

There was not much going back into the past when she was a girl and the
'master' a lad, and they went courting of a Sunday afternoon along the
green lanes. Life had been too matter-of-fact and full of hard work to
leave much sentiment even in memory.

Mr Robins heard of the accident in the evening, and went up to the
cottage, where he found Bill taking care of Zoe, who was having a fine
time of it, having soon discovered that she had only to cry for
anything that evening to get it, and that it was an occasion for
displaying a will of her own in the matter of going to bed, and being
preternaturally wide awake and inclined for a game, when on other
nights she was quite content to be laid down in the wooden cradle,
which was rapidly becoming too small for her increasing size.

Poor Bill had been at school when the accident happened, and, of
course, the neighbours had made the very worst of the matter, so the
poor boy hardly knew what part of his father had not been crushed or
injured, or if he had been killed on the spot, or had been taken barely
alive to the hospital. The baby had been pushed into his arms, so that
he could not go up to the farm, nor find Tom to learn the rights of the
matter; so that, when Mr Robins came into the cottage, he found both
Bill and the baby crying together, the fire out, a