sea ordinary times--expects 'en when I sees
'en--but then I wer weak, like, an' full o' fancies. An' after I got
about again I wer much too weak to go to cementry: I used to faint
every time I come'd downstairs. Howsbe-ever, I did come down again, an'
Tony used to go out and get me quinine wine and three-and-sixpenny port
an' all sorts o' messes, to put me on me legs wi'out fainting. 'Twas
thic illness as broke me o' going up to Rosie's grave."

"You walk up now on Sunday evenings...." I hazarded, recollecting that
then the children run wild for a couple of hours and come in tired and
dirty to cry for their mam.

"Yes...." said Mrs Widger.

I saw that I had trespassed into one of the little solitary tracts of
her life.

"One day," she continued, backing the conversation with an imperfectly
hidden effort, "when Dr Bayliss come to see me, Tony was asleep in the
next bed, snoring under the clothes after a night to sea. Dr Bayliss
didn' say nort, 'cept he said: 'Your husband's a fisherman, isn't he,
Mrs Widger?' But I saw his shoulders a-shaking as he went out the door,
an' that evening he sent me a bottle o' port wine out o' his own
cellar, an' it did me a power o' gude. Tony--he was that ashamed o'
hisself, though I told 'en 'twasn't nothing for a doctor to see
'en...."

[Sidenote: _FRANKNESS AND SMUT_]

At that moment Tony returned. He really was ashamed of the doctor
finding him in bed, whether as a breach of manners or of propriety was
not plain. Possibly the latter. He has an acute sense of decency,
though its rules and regulations are not the same as those of the
people he calls gentry. Our conversation here would hardly suit a
drawing-room. Tony, if he comes in wet, thinks nothing of stripping
down to his shirt. But, curiously enough, one of his chief complaints
about the people who hire boats, is their occasionally unclean
conversation. "The likes o' us 'ould never think of saying what they
du. Me, I didn' know nort about half the things they say till I wer
grow'd up an' learnt it from listening to the likes o' they. Yu'd
hear bad language wi' us an' plain speaking, but never what some o'
they talks about when they got no one to hear 'em 'cept us they hires,
an' they thinks us don't matter." Tony is right, I believe. Most of
the impropriety I used to hear at school, university, and in the
smoking room, though often little but a reaction against silly
conventions, a tilt against whited sepulchres,--was well