en let me go
where my children are.'

"I was surprised at her manner of speaking, which I would not have
allowed to her, but more than all about her children, which she could
only have been dreaming yet, for nobody else came nigh her except only
me, miss, and you, miss, and for you to breathe words was impossible.
All you did was to lie very quiet, tucked up into your mother's side;
and as regular as the time-piece went, wide came your eyes and your
mouth to be fed. If your nature had been cross or squally, 'baby's
coffin No. 7' would have come after all the other six, which the thief
of a carpenter put down on his bill as if it was so many shavings.

"Well, now, to tell you the downright truth, I have a lot of work to do
to-morrow, miss, with three basketfuls of washing coming home, and a
man about a tap that leaks and floods the inside of the fender; and if
I were to try to put before you the way that those two for the last time
of their lives went on to one another--the one like a man and the other
like a woman, full of sobs and choking--my eyes would be in such a state
to-morrow that the whole of them would pity and cheat me. And I ought to
think of you as well, miss, who has been sadly harrowed listening when
you was not born yet. And to hear what went on, full of weeping, when
yourself was in the world, and able to cry for yourself, and all done
over your own little self, would leave you red eyes and no spirit for
the night, and no appetite in the morning; and so I will pass it all
over, if you please, and let him go out of the backdoor again.

"This he was obliged to do quick, and no mistake, glad as he might
have been to say more words, because the fellows who call themselves
officers, without any commission, were after him. False it was to say,
as was said, that he got out of Winchester jail through money. That
story was quite of a piece with the rest. His own strength and skill it
was that brought him out triumphantly, as the scratches on his hands and
cheeks might show. He did it for the sake of his wife, no doubt. When
he heard that the children were all in their graves, and their mother
in the way to follow them, madness was better than his state of mind, as
the officers told me when they could not catch him--and sorry they would
have been to do it, I believe.

"To overhear my betters is the thing of all things most against my
nature; and my poor lady being unfit to get up, there was nothing said
on the