If you please Miss, asking your pardon, when Aunt Muxworthy were here, to the christening time, she said she never see such writing in her life as mine, and it wasn’t my best copy neither, and she said it was a sin to make a scholar of a honest wench like that, and I should want to be the parson next, and read the forty-two generations and play the fort piano; and I didn’t know, Miss, whether to laugh or cry, so I began to eat an apple; but father say quite slowly, "Sister Muxworthy, you was never gifted with no eddication no more nor I Jan Uxtable, and how be us to know if it be good or bad? Once I had a horse, say father, as afore ever he went into the field, turned up his nose at the grass like, and with turning up so much he died at last of the glanders. But I never see that there horse persuade the others to starve." Aunt Muxworthy toss her head, and we thought she wouldn’t eat no goose, but the smell of the stuffing and the weather was too many for her; and she eat a wing, and a leg, and one side of the breast, and it do her good. And afore she had had much brandy, "John," she say, "you was right and I was wrong. Let the little wench crack on, and some day they’ll hear of her to tother side of Hexmoor." So father laugh and kiss her, and the chillers was put to bed, and we drink your health Miss, and Clara’s nine times nine, and father say he’ll learn himself some day, when he give up wrestling, only he fear it would make his hand shake terrible, and then some laugh and some of us cry, and they has more hot water, and Beany Dawe set to, and make so many poems he turn the stairs somehow inside out, and Suke and Tim was forced to heave him into the tallat, and keep him from going abroad by a rope of onions round him and two truss of hay on the top. Next day, he make no poems at all till he drink more than a gallon of cider. Oh Miss Clara dear, what ever is the matter with you? Father be in such a taking I never see. To-day your letter come about selling that knob-thing of Beany Dawe’s, and we knows it must be all along of the crown jewels you bought for us, as we meant to keep in the family to the end of all our time. Mother double up, and cry into the churn, and spoil all the butter; and father were that upset he stamp out of the house a trying hard to whistle, and he couldn’t see no one there to let it off on but Timothy Badcock, and he were a little saucy, so he toss Tim up on the linhay roof and his legs come through the thatch, and father was forced to ease him out with the pitchfork. Tim was stiff a bit in the evening, and serve him right say mother, for laughing so at the Cornishers; but father give him some neatsfoot oil and cider, and we knew us couldn’t hurt him because he be double-jointed.