se up from the very edge of a great stagnant pond.
Overhead there was an elm, from the branches of which in wet weather
there was a perpetual drip, drip on the thatch, till the moss and grass
grew on the roof in profusion. All the sewage and drainage from the
cottage ran into the pond, over which at night there was almost always a
thick damp mist, which crept in through the crevices of the rotten
walls, and froze the blood in the sleepers' veins. Sometimes a flood
came down, and the pond rose and washed away the cabbages from the
garden, leaving a deposit of gritty sand which killed all vegetation,
and they could only keep the water from coming indoors by making a small
dam of clay across the doorway. There was only a low hedge of elder
between the cottage and a dirty lane; and in the night, especially if
there happened to be a light burning, it was common enough for a stone
to come through the window, flung by some half-drunken ploughboy. A
pretty place for a human being to live in: and again he looked up into
Smith's face for comment.

"Thee built 'un thee-self, didn't 'ee?" said John, in his slow way.

"Ay, that I did," continued Jim, not seeing the drift of the remark. He
not only built it, but he brought up nineteen children in it, and
fourteen of them lived to grow up, all the offspring of one wife. And a
time she had of it, too. None of them ever fell in that pond, though he
often wished they would; and they were all pretty healthy, which was a
bad thing, because it made them hungry, and if they had been ill the
parish would have kept them. All that he had done on 12s. a week, and he
minded the time when it was only 9s., ay, and even when it was 6s., and
'twas better then than it was now with 15s. That was before the Unions
came about, in the time of the old workhouses in every parish. Then the
farmers used to find everybody a job. Every morning they had to go round
from one farmer to the other, and if there was no work then they went to
the workhouse, or sometimes to the vestry-room in the church, where
every man had a loaf of bread for every head there was in his family, so
that the more children he had the more loaves of bread, which was a
capital thing when the children were small. He had known a man in those
times sent seven miles with a wheelbarrow to fetch a barrow load of coal
from the canal wharf, and then have to wheel it back seven miles, and
get one shilling for his day's work. Still they were better