is wages were
stopped. So he worked in the wet very often, for it generally rains in
England, you know. The wet came through our roof. Gives the natives such
pretty pink skins, eh, Geisner?" and he laughed shortly. "My father got
rheumatism, and used to keep us awake groaning at nights. He had been a
good-looking young fellow, my old granny used to say. I never saw him
good-looking. In the winter we always had poor relief. We should have
starved if we hadn't. My father got up at four and came home after dark.
My mother used to go weeding and gleaning. I went to scare crows when I
was five years old. All the same, we were a family of paupers. Proud to
be an Englishman, Geisner! Be an English pauper, and then try!"

"You'll never get to the priests, Ford, if you start an argument,"
interposed Mrs. Stratton.

"I'll get to them all right. Our cottage was down a narrow, muddy lane.
On one side of the lane was a row of miserable stone hovels, just like
ours. On the other was a great stone wall that seemed to me, then, to be
about a hundred feet high. I suppose it was about twenty feet. You could
just see the tops of trees the other side. Some had branches lopped short
to prevent them coming over the wall. At the corner of the highway our
lane ran to was a great iron gate, all about it towering trees, directly
inside a mound of shrub-covered rockery that prevented anybody getting a
peep further. The carriage drive took a turn round this rockery and
disappeared. Once, when the gate was open and nobody about, I got a peep
by sneaking round this rockery like a little thief. There was a beautiful
lawn and clumps of flowers, and a summer house and a conservatory, and a
big grey-fronted mansion. I thought heaven must be something like that.
It made me radical."

"How do you mean?" asked Mrs. Stratton.

"Well, it knocked respect for constituted authority out of me. I didn't
know enough to understand the wrong of one lazy idler having this
splendid place while the people he lived on kennelled in hovels. But it
struck me as so villainously selfish to build that wall, to prevent us
outside from even looking at the beautiful lawn and flowers. I was only a
little chap but I recollect wondering if it would hurt the place to let
me look, and when I couldn't see that it would I began to hate the wall
like poison. There we were, poor, ragged, hungry wretches, without
anything beautiful in our lives, so miserable and hopeless that I didn't