e evening she would have nothing
whatever to show for her money. Besides, the children would never go
off to bed quietly if they imagined that she was going to a real
entertainment. As she did not return very early last night, Tony and I
got our own supper--bread, cheese, a great deal of Worcester sauce, and
a pint of mother-in-law [stout and bitter] from the Alexandra. Then we
drew up to the fire and smoked. John, healthy and powerful fellow, had
been arguing in the daytime on the beach, that if a youth cannot do a
man's work at seventeen, he never will. Tony disagreed. Twenty-five to
thirty-five, he says, is a man's prime for strength and endurance
together. Nevertheless, he is sure that he often did more than a man's
work long before he was seventeen, which led him to talk about his
boyhood, when Granfer and Gran Widger had frequently not enough food in
the house for their many children to eat. "Us had to rough it when I
wer a boy, I can tell 'ee," says Tony. "'Twer often bread an' a scraape
o' fat an' _Get 'long out o'it_!"

[Sidenote: _TONY'S DUTIES_]

At nine years old, Tony was put with old Cloade, the grocer, now dead;
and by the time he was twelve, he was earning four shillings a week,
not a penny of which he ever saw or had as 'spending money'; for his
mother used to go to the shop every Saturday night and lay out all poor
Tony's wages in groceries. The only pocket-money he ever received was a
copper or two 'thrown back' from what he could earn by going to sea for
mackerel early enough to return to work by half-past six in the
morning. Besides running errands, he had to clean boots and knives and
to scrub out and tidy up the bar, which in those days was attached to
every Devon grocery. Then he could go home to breakfast. And if old
Cloade was going up on land, shooting, Tony had to get up and wake him
at half-past three and to cork bottles or something of that sort before
the master started out for his day's sport. And again, if Tony had
fallen foul of any of the shop assistants during the day, had cheeked
them perhaps, or stayed overlong at meals, then, waiting till closing
time at eight or nine in the evening, they would send him a couple of
miles inland, to the top of the hills, with a late parcel of groceries.
His possible working day was from 3.30 a.m. to 10.0 p.m.

The chief part of his work, when he was not cleaning up or running
errands, was the sorting of fruit and the cracking of sugar. Every nail