e to eat anything. They do not believe me when I tell them
that they have more food than ever I did at their age; that I had to
eat a piece of bread and a potato for each slice of meat; that jam and
butter together was not thought good for me except on birthdays and
Sundays. "G'out!" they say. "Ye lie!" Sometimes their mother is
irritated into calling them 'cawdy li'l devils.' It does seem almost a
pity that they have not had any of the discipline of starvation. The
Yarty children who go half the day, and only too often whole days, on
empty stomachs, are certainly as happy as ours: they never cry because
dinner is not so good as they expect, and if we give them half a pie
their earth is straightway heavenly. Tony thinks now and then how hard
it will go with his children if the money runs short, as it has done
and may easily do again. "I mind the time," he says, "when I used to
come in hungry and kneel down beside me mother wi' me head across her
lap, crying! Her crying too; mother 'cause her hadn't got nort to eat
in house, and me 'cause her didn't get nort, and 'cause her cuden't get
nort, not even half an ounce o' tay, not havin' no money in house to
get it with. An' then I used to go out an' try an' earn something,
twopence maybe, just to stay us on."

And that it is which has helped to make Tony the man he is.

22

[Sidenote: _A SUDDEN STORM_]

Seldom does one catch the exact moment of an abrupt change in nature.
Yesterday, however, I watched a wonderful thing--the oncoming of a
sudden storm.

Uncle Jake had been holding forth on the beach. "Us ain't had no
equinoctial gales thees year, not proper like us used to. This season's
going to break up sudden and wi' thunder, an' when it du, look out! I'd
rather be here now than out in the offing, for all the sea's so calm.
Ah!" pointing to a dinghy that was shoving off the beach, "they bwoys
'ould laugh in me faace if I was to go an' say, 'Don' go. 'Tisn't fit.'
But _I_ knows."

I left him gazing seaward over the stern of his drifter, and walked up
to the Western Cliffs. The air, scarcely a breath from the north-east,
was oppressive in the extreme; very warm, too, for autumn. The sea was
almost unruffled; the sky to westward magnificently heaped up with what
Uncle Jake calls wool-packs. A fog crept over all the southern horizon,
dimming with its misty approach the eastern headlands and making the
sea like a dulled mirror. I felt, rather than heard, distant thunde