elf!'

This was caused by a violent blow across the shins with a thick
stick, the deed of certain drunken wiseacres who were persisting in
playing in the dark the never very lucrative game of three sticks a
penny, conducted by a couple of gipsies. Poor fellows! there was
one excuse for them. It was the only thing there to play at, except
a set of skittles; and on those they had lost their money every
Saturday night for the last seven years each at his own village
beer-shop.

So into the booth they turned; and as soon as Lancelot's eyes were
accustomed to the reeking atmosphere, he saw seated at two long
temporary tables of board, fifty or sixty of 'My Brethren,' as
clergymen call them in their sermons, wrangling, stupid, beery, with
sodden eyes and drooping lips--interspersed with more girls and
brazen-faced women, with dirty flowers in their caps, whose whole
business seemed to be to cast jealous looks at each other, and
defend themselves from the coarse overtures of their swains.

Lancelot had been already perfectly astonished at the foulness of
language which prevailed; and the utter absence of anything like
chivalrous respect, almost of common decency, towards women. But
lo! the language of the elder women was quite as disgusting as that
of the men, if not worse. He whispered a remark on the point to
Tregarva, who shook his head.

'It's the field-work, sir--the field-work, that does it all. They
get accustomed there from their childhood to hear words whose very
meanings they shouldn't know; and the older teach the younger ones,
and the married ones are worst of all. It wears them out in body,
sir, that field-work, and makes them brutes in soul and in manners.'

'Why don't they give it up? Why don't the respectable ones set
their faces against it?'

'They can't afford it, sir. They must go a-field, or go hungered,
most of them. And they get to like the gossip and scandal, and
coarse fun of it, while their children are left at home to play in
the roads, or fall into the fire, as plenty do every year.'

'Why not at school?'

'The big ones are kept at home, sir, to play at nursing those little
ones who are too young to go. Oh, sir,' he added, in a tone of deep
feeling, 'it is very little of a father's care, or a mother's love,
that a labourer's child knows in these days!'

Lancelot looked round the booth with a hopeless feeling. There was
awkward dancing going on at