One afternoon during this time, we started to go to the Jacobsons' after a one-o'clock dinner,--I and Mrs. Todhetley. She was fond of going over to an early tea there, but not by herself, for part of the way across the fields was lonely. Considering that she had been used to the country, she was a regular coward as to lonely walks, expecting to see tramps or robbers at every corner. In passing the row of cottages in Duck Lane, for we took that road, we saw Hannah Mitchel leaning over the footboard of her door to look after her children, who were playing near the pond in the sunshine with a lot more; quite a heap of the little reptiles, all badly clad and as dirty as pigs. Other labourers' dwellings stood within hail, and the children seemed to spring up in the place thicker than wheat; Mrs. Mitchel's was quite a small family, reckoning by comparison, but how the six were clothed and fed was a mystery, out of Mitchel's wages of ten shillings a week. It was thought good pay. Old Jacobson was liberal, as farmers go. He paid the best wages; gave all his labourers a stunning big portion of home-fed pork at Christmas, with fuel to cook it: and his wife was good to the women when they fell sick. Mrs. Todhetley stopped to speak. "Is it you, Hannah Mitchel? Are you pretty well?" Hannah Mitchel stood upright and dropped a curtsey. She had a bundle in her arms, which proved to be the baby, then not much above a fortnight old. "Dear me! it's very early for it to be about," said Mrs. Todhetley, touching its little red cheeks. "And for you too." "It is, ma'am; but what's to be done?" was the answer. "When there's only one pair of hands for everything, one can't afford to lie by long." "You seem but poorly," said Mrs. Todhetley, looking at her. She was a thin, dark-haired woman, with a sensible face. Before she married Mitchel, she had lived as under-nurse in a gentleman's family, where she picked up some idea of good manners. "I be feeling a bit stronger, thank you," said the woman. "Strength don't come back to one in a day, ma'am." The Mitchel children were sidling up, attracted by the sight of the lady. Four young grubs in tattered garments. "I can't keep 'em decent," said the mother, with a sigh of apology. "I've not got no soap nor no clothes to do it with. They come on so fast, and make such a many, one after another, that it's getting a hard pull to live anyhow." Looking at the children; remembering that, with the father and mother, there were eight mouths to feed, and that the man's wages were the ten shillings a week all the year round (but there were seasons when he did over-work and earned more), Mrs. Todhetley might well give her assenting answer with an emphatic nod. "We was hoping to get on a bit better," resumed the wife; "but Mitchel he says the master don't seem to like to listen. A'most a three weeks it be now since Mitchel first asked it him." "In what way better?"