“Well,” said Annie, “we’ve the factory. But there’s times like this when I’ve my arms full of you and my head full of the smell of heather. And there’s times like mischief-neet”--that is, the night of the first of May--“and th’ Bush-Bearing in August. I like th’ Wakes, lad... oh, and lots of times that aren’t all factory. There’s Easter and Whitsun and Christmas.” There were: there were these survivals of a more jocund age, honored still, if by curtailed celebrations. The trouble was that the curtailments were too severe, that neither of cakes nor ale, neither of bread nor circuses was there sufficient offset against the grinding hardships of the factories. Both John and Annie had so recently emerged from the status of child-slavery that the larger life of adults might well have seemed freedom enough; to Annie, aided by Phoebe’s sacrifice, to Annie, living more physically than John, to Annie, who rarely looked beyond one short respite unless it was to the next, the present seemed not amiss. Except the life of the roads and the heaths, to which she saw no possibility of return, from which the factory had weaned her, she had no traditions, while he had Peter Bradshaw for tradition. He had slipped down the ladder, and there was resentment, usually dormant, of the fact that he saw no chance to climb again. “Things are,” was her philosophy. “I’m none in factory now, and I’m none fretting about factory and you’d do best to hold your hush about your grandfer, John. His’n weren’t a gradely factory.” That was it. She accepted Hepplestall’s, while John accepted the habit of Hepplestall’s, dully, subterraneously resenting it. She almost took a pride in the size of Hepplestall’s. “And,” she said, good Methodist as she was, “there’s a better life to come.” He had no reply to make to that. The Methodist was the working class religion, as opposed to the Church of the upper classes and, at first, the rulers had seen danger in it, and in an unholy alliance of Methodism with Reform. There was something, but not a great deal in their fear. There was the fact, for instance, that in the Methodist Sunday Schools reading and writing were taught. “The modern Methodists,” says Bamford in his ‘Early Days,’ “may boast of this feat as their especial work. The church party never undertook to instruct in writing on Sundays.” That far, but not much farther, the Methodists stood for enlightenment. Cobbett gave them no credit at all. He said, in 1824, “the bitterest foes of freedom in England have been, and are, the Methodists.” Annie had “got religion”: the sufferings and the hardships of this life were mere preparations for radiant happiness to come, and a religion of this sort was not for citizens but for saints; it gave no battle to the Devil, Steam.