d to the making and mending of clothes. Hetty
would have been glad to hear that she should never see a child again;
they were worse than the nasty little lambs that the shepherd was always
bringing in to be taken special care of in lambing time; for the lambs
WERE got rid of sooner or later. As for the young chickens and turkeys,
Hetty would have hated the very word "hatching," if her aunt had not
bribed her to attend to the young poultry by promising her the proceeds
of one out of every brood. The round downy chicks peeping out from under
their mother's wing never touched Hetty with any pleasure; that was
not the sort of prettiness she cared about, but she did care about the
prettiness of the new things she would buy for herself at Treddleston
Fair with the money they fetched. And yet she looked so dimpled,
so charming, as she stooped down to put the soaked bread under the
hen-coop, that you must have been a very acute personage indeed to
suspect her of that hardness. Molly, the housemaid, with a turn-up nose
and a protuberant jaw, was really a tender-hearted girl, and, as Mrs.
Poyser said, a jewel to look after the poultry; but her stolid
face showed nothing of this maternal delight, any more than a brown
earthenware pitcher will show the light of the lamp within it.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies
hidden under the "dear deceit" of beauty, so it is not surprising that
Mrs. Poyser, with her keenness and abundant opportunity for observation,
should have formed a tolerably fair estimate of what might be expected
from Hetty in the way of feeling, and in moments of indignation she had
sometimes spoken with great openness on the subject to her husband.

"She's no better than a peacock, as 'ud strut about on the wall and
spread its tail when the sun shone if all the folks i' the parish was
dying: there's nothing seems to give her a turn i' th' inside, not even
when we thought Totty had tumbled into the pit. To think o' that dear
cherub! And we found her wi' her little shoes stuck i' the mud an'
crying fit to break her heart by the far horse-pit. But Hetty never
minded it, I could see, though she's been at the nussin' o' the child
ever since it was a babby. It's my belief her heart's as hard as a
pebble."

"Nay, nay," said Mr. Poyser, "thee mustn't judge Hetty too hard. Them
young gells are like the unripe grain; they'll make good meal by and by,
but they're squashy as yet. Thee't s