ued and
furtive appearance.

The rooms were furnished mainly with articles bought in London, but
these became as like Thrums dressers and seats as their owners could
make them, old Petey, for instance, cutting the back off a chair because
he felt most at home on stools. Drawers were used as baking-boards,
pails turned into salt-buckets, floors were sanded and hearthstones
ca'med, and the popular supper consisted of porter, hot water, and
soaked bread, after every spoonful of which, they groaned pleasantly,
and stretched their legs. Sometimes they played at the dambrod, but more
often they pulled down the blinds on London and talked of Thrums in
their mother tongue. Nevertheless few of them wanted to return to it,
and their favorite joke was the case of James Gloag's father, who being
home-sick flung up his situation and took train for Thrums, but he was
back in London in three weeks.

Tommy soon had the entry to these homes, and his first news of the
inmates was unexpected. It was that they were always sleeping. In broad
daylight he had seen Thrums men asleep on beds, and he was somewhat
ashamed of them until he heard the excuse. A number of the men from
Thrums were bakers, the first emigrant of this trade having drawn others
after him, and they slept great part of the day to be able to work all
night in a cellar, making nice rolls for rich people. Baker Lumsden, who
became a friend of Tommy, had got his place in the cellar when his
brother died, and the brother had succeeded Matthew Croall when he died.

They die very soon, Tommy learned from Lumsden, generally when they are
eight and thirty. Lumsden was thirty-six, and when he died his nephew
was to get the place. The wages are good.

Then there were several masons, one of whom, like the first baker, had
found work for all the others, and there were men who had drifted into
trades strange to their birthplace, and there was usually one at least
who had come to London to "better himself" and had not done it as yet.
The family Tommy liked best was the Whamonds, and especially he liked
old Petey and young Petey Whamond. They were a large family of women and
men, all of whom earned their living in other streets, except the old
man, who kept house and was a famous knitter of stockings, as probably
his father had been before him. He was a great one, too, at telling what
they would be doing at that moment in Thrums, every corner of which was
as familiar to him as the ins