ndal, and
the neighbours dearly wished to see him put a stop to it. Yet, though he
would have had public opinion to support him in taking strong measures,
his own good nature deterred him from doing so. Probably, too, his own
course was the happier one. Thrive he never could, and gloomy enough and
dispirited enough he used to look at times; yet to see him with his
children on Sundays--two or three squalid, laughing urchins--was to see
a very acceptable sight.

Returning to the main point, if anyone has a taste for ugly behaviour,
and thinks nothing "real" but what is uncomfortable too, he may find
plenty of subjects for study in the married life of this parish; but he
will be ridiculously mistaken if he supposes the ugliness to be normal.
A kind of dogged comradeship--I can find no better word for it--is what
commonly unites the labouring man and his wife; they are partners and
equals running their impecunious affairs by mutual help. I was lately
able to observe a man and woman after a removal settling down into their
new quarters. It was the most ordinary, matter-of-fact affair in the
world. The man, uncouth and strong, like a big dog or an amiable big
boy, moved about willingly under his wife's direction, doing the various
jobs that required strength. One evening, in rain, his wife stood
watching while he chopped away the wet summer grass that had grown tall
under the garden hedge; then she pointed out four or five spots against
the hedge, where he proceeded to put in wooden posts. Early the next
morning there was a clothes-line between the posts, and the household
washing was hanging from it. Nothing could have been more commonplace
than the whole incident, but the commonness was the beauty of it. And it
was done somehow in a way that warmed one to a feeling of great liking
for those two people.

Very often it seems to be the woman who supplies the brains, and does
the scheming, for the partnership. When old Bettesworth was on his last
legs, as many as half a dozen different men applied to me for his job,
of whom one, I very well remember, apologized for troubling me, but said
his "missus" told him to come. Poor chap! it was his idea of courtesy to
offer an apology, and it was the Old Adam in him that laid the blame on
his wife, for really he desired very much to escape from his arduous
night-work on the railway. At the same time there is not the least doubt
that what he said was true; that he and his wife had talke