It was a gaunt, dreary-looking house in its present state of decay. The garden was all at the back, and the front of the house came straight upon the village street, an advantage in the eyes of the younger Scratchells, as the few passers-by who enlivened the scene came within half a yard of their inquisitive young noses, which were generally glued against the window-panes in all intervals of leisure. The Scratchell girls did not go to school. That was a luxury which their father’s limited means could not afford them. They were educated at home by their mother, in that desultory and somewhat spasmodic form which maternal education, where the poor house-mother has a multitude of other duties, is apt to assume. Taking all things into consideration, it must be allowed that Mrs. Scratchell did her work very well. She turned the four girls into the shabby old schoolroom at eleven o’clock every morning--after they had helped her to make the beds, dust the rooms, and wash the breakfast-things. She set them down to their French exercises or their ciphering, their maps or their English analysis, while she went to the kitchen to see after the dinner, which generally meant to cook it, and at twelve she came into the schoolroom with her huge motherly workbasket--full of stockings to be darned, and under garments to be pieced--some of them arrived at a stage when piecing seemed little short of the miraculous--and sat down to hear her children read history or polite literature in their shrill monotonous voices, while the busy needle never ceased from its labour. Pinnock’s Goldsmith and darning cotton must have been curiously interwoven in poor Mrs. Scratchell’s mind, and it must have been a little difficult for her to dissociate the embarrassments of Telemachus from the intricacies of her domestic patchwork. In this wise, however, the young Scratchell girls contrived to get educated, perhaps pretty nearly as well as the general run of girls, at home or abroad. The humble and old-fashioned education which Mrs. Scratchell had received herself she handed down to her daughters. She could not teach them German, or Italian, for she had never learnt those languages. She could not ground them in the Latin tongue, for in her day Latin had been considered an exclusively masculine accomplishment. She could not teach them the use of the globes, for she had no globes; nor natural science, for she scarcely knew what it meant. But she made them plough laboriously through Noel and Chapsal’s French grammar, until they knew it thoroughly. She taught them English, and Roman, and Grecian history till they could have set you right upon the dates and details of any great event you could mention. She made them very familiar with the geography of this globe, and the manners and customs of its inhabitants; and she taught them a good deal about common things, which might or might not be useful to them in after life.