neighbours' fare, and
none of them felt hardly used, for Farmer Benson, what with bad seasons
and cattle plague, was not much better off than they were, and the men
knew it.

But out of these wages it was hardly to be expected of the most
provident of people that anything could be laid by for old age or a
rainy day; indeed, there seemed so many rainy days in the present that
it was not easy to give much thought to those in the future. Of course
too the local provident club had come to utter and hopeless grief. Is
there any country place where this has not been the case? Gray had
paid into it regularly for years and had gone every Whitmonday to its
dinner, his one voluntary holiday during the year, on which occasion he
took too much beer as a sort of solemn duty connected with his
membership. When it collapsed he was too old to join another club, and
so was left stranded. He bore it very philosophically; indeed, I think
it was only on Whitmonday that he felt it at all, as it seemed strange
and unnatural to go to bed quite sober on that day, as he did on all
other days of the year.

On all other occasions he was a thoroughly sober man, perhaps, however,
more from necessity than choice, as the beer supplied by Farmer Benson
in the hayfield was of a quality on which, as the men said, you got 'no
forrarder' if you drank a hogshead, and Gray had no money to spare from
the necessaries of life to spend on luxury, even the luxury of getting
drunk.

He was in one way better off than his neighbours from a worldly point
of view, in that he had not a large family as most of them were blessed
with; for children are a blessing, a gift and heritage that cometh of
the Lord, even when they cluster round a cold hearth and a scanty
board. But Gray had only two sons, the elder of whom, Tom, we have
seen at Zoe's christening, and who had been at work four years, having
managed at twelve to scramble into the fifth standard, and at once left
school triumphantly, and now can neither read nor write, having clean
forgotten everything drummed into his head, but earns three shillings
and sixpence a week going along with Farmer Benson's horses, from five
o'clock in the morning till six in the evening, the long wet furrows
and heavy ploughed land having made havoc of his legs, as such work
does with most plough-boys.

The younger boy, Bill, is six years younger and still at school, and
having been a delicate child, or as his mother puts i