One night, as the mother worked alone, young Will woke up in the little orange-box bedstead by the wall where he slept with a younger brother. Silently he watched her plying the needle at the table until he noticed tears trickling down her cheeks. "What are you crying for, mother?" "Never mind, Will, my boy. You go to sleep." "But you must be crying about something, mother." And then, in a doleful tone, she said, "It's through wondering where the next meal is coming from, my boy." The little chap pretended to go to sleep soon after; but now and again he would peep cautiously over the side of the box at his mother silently crying over her work at the table. And he puzzled his young head as to what it all meant. "My mother crying because she can't get bread for us! Why can't she get bread? I saw plenty of bread in the shops yesterday. Do all mothers have to cry before they can get bread for their children?" It was the first incident that made him think. There was one morning, the morning after a Christmas Day of all times in the year, when his mother refused to let him or the others get up, even when she left the house. It was not until she returned after what seemed a long time, bringing with her a portion of a loaf, that she allowed them to get out of bed. "It was many years afterwards before I learnt the reason for her strange conduct that Boxing Day morning. Then I found out that she had made a vow that her children should never get up unless there was some breakfast for them. "We were so poor that we children never got a drop of tea for months together. It used to be bread and treacle for breakfast, bread and treacle for dinner, bread and treacle for tea, washed down with a cup of cold water. Sometimes there was a little variation in the form of dripping. At other times the variety was secured by there being neither treacle nor dripping. The very bread was so scarce that mother could not afford to allow the three eldest, of whom I was one, more than three slices apiece at a meal, while the four youngest got two and a half slices. Whenever we could afford to buy tea or butter, it was only in ounces. Once my brother and I were sent to buy a whole quarter of a pound of butter--it turned out that auntie was coming to tea--and on the way we speculated seriously whether mother was going to open a shop." Perhaps the first occasion upon which Crooks as a lad showed something of that spirited resentment at aspersions on the poor which ultimately led him into public life was one that arose in a cobbler's shop. He was about eight years old, when his father sent him back with a pair of boots that had been repaired to ask that a little more be done to them for the money. "I don't know what he wants for his ninepence," said the cobbler, referring to the lad's father; "but, there!"--throwing the boots to his man--"put another patch on. He's only a poor beggar."