Neale might easily forget this sore subject, and every other that was disagreeable to other people, in the jollity at the Plough and Harrow, where there was an uproar of tipsy mirth for the greater part of the night. But Mr. Finch found little mirth among the people left at home in the cottages. The poor women, who lived hardly, knitting for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and finding themselves less and less able to overtake the advancing prices of the necessaries of life, had no great store of spirits to spend in rejoicing over victories, or anything else; and among them there was one who loved Jack Neale, and was beloved by him; and others, who respected Widow Slaney, and could not countenance noisy mirth while she was sunk in horror and grief. They were hungry enough, too, to look upon young Slaney’s death as something of an outrage. If hunger and nakedness had driven him into the shelter of a town, to avoid dying by the roadside, it seemed to them that being shot was a hard punishment for the offence. Mr. Finch endeavoured to show, in hackneyed language, what the dereliction of duty really was, and how intolerable during warfare; but the end of it was that the neighbours pitied the poor young man the more, the more they dwelt upon his fate. As it turned out, Bleaburn made more sacrifices to the war than those of the Battle of Albuera, even before drum or fife was again heard coming over the moor. The place had not been healthy before; and illness set in somewhat seriously after the excitements of the bonfire night. The cold and wet spring had discouraged the whole kingdom about the harvest; and in Bleaburn it had done something more. Where there are stone houses, high winds aggravate the damage of wet weather. The driven rain had been sucked in by the stone; and more wet was absorbed from the foundations, when the swollen stream had rushed down the hollow, and overflowed into the houses, and the pigstyes, and every empty place into which it could run. Where there were glass windows and fires in the rooms, the panes were dewy, and the walls shiny with trickling drops; and in the cottages where there were no fires, the inhabitants were so chilly, that they stuffed up every broken window-pane, and closed all chinks by which air might enter, in hopes of keeping themselves warm; but the floors were never really dry that summer, and even the beds had a chilly feel. The best shoes showed mould between one Sunday and another; and the meal in the bin (of those who were so fortunate as to have a meal-bin) did not keep well. Mr. Finch had talked a great deal about what was to be expected from summer weather and the harvest; but as the weeks went on, there were graver doubts about the harvest than there had been even while people were complaining at Easter, and shaking their heads at Whitsuntide; and when a few days of hot weather came at last, the people of Bleaburn did not know how to bear them at all. The dead rats and