'I don't think it. He's busy getting ready a Christmas show for the window; he wants to make it look very gay, to attract business: Grandfather's dreadfully worried because business is so bad. People are not laying out as much money as they used to do.' 'Money don't buy what it used to do, Bess; things are dearer, and money's the same. Father isn't earning a shilling more to-day than he earnt ten years ago, and meat's gone up, and rent's gone up, and plenty of other things have gone up' But we've got to be contented, my dear, and make the best of things. If George could get enough work at home to keep him going, do you suppose he'd ever ha' thought of going to the other end of the world?' She asks this question, with a shrewd, watchful look into Bessie's face, which the girl does not see, her eyes being towards the fire; and adds immediately, 'Although he's not going for long, thank God.' 'It is very, very hard,' sighs Bessie, 'that he should have to go.' 'It would be harder, my dear, for him to remain here doing nothing. There's nothing that does a man--or a woman either, Bess--so much mischief as idleness. My old mother used to say that when a man's idle, he's worshipping the devil. You know very well, Bess, that I'm all for contentment. One can make a little do if one's mind is made up for it--just as one can find a great deal not enough if one's mind is set that way. For my part, I think that life's too short to worrit your inside out, a-wishing for this, and a-longing for that, and a-sighing for t'other. When George began to talk of going abroad, I said to him, "Home's home, George, and you can be happy on bread-and-cheese and kisses, supposing you can't get better." "Very well, mother," said George, "I'm satisfied with that. But come," said he, in his coaxing way--_you_ know, Bessie!--"But come, you say home's home, and you're right, mammy." (He always calls me mammy when he's going to get the best of me with his tongue--he knows, the cunning lad, that it reminds me of the time when he was a babby!) "You're right, mammy," he said; "but I love Bess, and I want to marry her. I want to have her all to myself," he said. "I'm not happy when I'm away from her," he said. "I want to see her a-setting by _my_ fireside," he said. "I don't want to be standing at the street-door a-saying goodnight to her"--(what a long time it takes a-saying! don't it, Bess? Ah, I remember!) "a-saying good-night to her with my arm round her waist, and my heart so full of love for her that I can hardly speak"--(his very words, my dear!)--"and then, just as I'm feeling happy and forgetting everything else in the world, to hear grandfather's voice piping out from the room behind the shop, 'Don't you think it's time to go home, George? Don't you think that it's time for Bessie to be a-bed?' And I don't want," said George, "when I answer in a shamefaced way, 'All right, grandfather; just five minutes