neath: "Our
Queen--Diamond Jubilee."

"What you earn is sweetest," quoth Mrs. Mugridge, when I suggested that
it was about time they took a rest.

"No, an' we don't want help," said Thomas Mugridge, in reply to my
question as to whether the children lent them a hand.

"We'll work till we dry up and blow away, mother an' me," he added; and
Mrs. Mugridge nodded her head in vigorous indorsement.

Fifteen children she had borne, and all were away and gone, or dead. The
"baby," however, lived in Maidstone, and she was twenty-seven. When the
children married they had their hands full with their own families and
troubles, like their fathers and mothers before them.

Where were the children? Ah, where were they not? Lizzie was in
Australia; Mary was in Buenos Ayres; Poll was in New York; Joe had died
in India--and so they called them up, the living and the dead, soldier
and sailor, and colonist's wife, for the traveller's sake who sat in
their kitchen.

They passed me a photograph. A trim young fellow, in soldier's garb
looked out at me.

"And which son is this?" I asked.

They laughed a hearty chorus. Son! Nay, grandson, just back from Indian
service and a soldier-trumpeter to the King. His brother was in the same
regiment with him. And so it ran, sons and daughters, and grand sons and
daughters, world-wanderers and empire-builders, all of them, while the
old folks stayed at home and worked at building empire too.

"There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
And a wealthy wife is she;
She breeds a breed o' rovin' men
And casts them over sea.

"And some are drowned in deep water,
And some in sight of shore;
And word goes back to the weary wife,
And ever she sends more."

But the Sea Wife's child-bearing is about done. The stock is running
out, and the planet is filling up. The wives of her sons may carry on
the breed, but her work is past. The erstwhile men of England are now
the men of Australia, of Africa, of America. England has sent forth "the
best she breeds" for so long, and has destroyed those that remained so
fiercely, that little remains for her to do but to sit down through the
long nights and gaze at royalty on the wall.

The true British merchant seaman has passed away. The merchant service
is no longer a recruiting ground for such sea dogs as fought with Nelson
at Trafalgar and the Nile. Foreigners largely man the merchant ships,
though Englishmen