Cottage visiting turned out to be a much chequered affair. One of the first places to which the sisters made their way was the Widow Mole's. They found it, rather beyond the church, down a lane, where it was hidden behind an overgrown thorn hedge, and they would scarcely have found it at all, if a three-year-old child had not been clattering an old bit of metal against the bar put across to prevent his exit. He was curly and clean, except with the day's surface dirt, but he only stared stolidly at the question whether Mrs Mole lived there. A ten-year-old girl came out, and answered the question. "Yes, mother do live here, but her be out at work." "Is that your grandfather?" as they caught sight of a very old man on a chair by the door, in the sun. "Yes, ma'am. Will you come in and see him?" He was a very old man, with scanty white hair, but he was very clean, and neatly dressed in a white smock, mended all over, but beautifully worked over the breast and cuffs, and long leather buskins. He was very civil, too. He took off his old straw hat, and rose slowly by the help of his stout stick, though the first impulse of the visitors was to beg him not to move. He did not hear them, but answered their gesture. "I be so crippled up with the rheumatics, you see, ma'am," and he put his knotted and contracted hand up to his ear. Mrs Carbonel shouted into his ear that she was sorry for him. She supposed his daughter was out at work. "Yes, ma'am, with Farmer Goodenough--a charing to-day it is." "Washing," screamed the little girl. "She was off at five o'clock this morning," he went on. "She do work hard, my daughter Bess, and she's a good one to me, and so is little Liz here. Thank the Lord for them." "And her husband is dead?" "Yes, ma'am. Fell off a haystack three years ago, and never spoke no more. We have always kept off the parish, ma'am. This bit of a cottage was my poor wife's, and she do want to leave it to the boy; but she be but frail, poor maid, and if she gave in, there'd be nothing for it but to give up the place and go to the workhouse; and there's such a lot there as I could not go and die among." He spoke it to the sympathising faces, not as one begging, and they found out that all was as he said. He had seen better days, and held his head above the parish pay, and so had his son-in-law but the early death of poor Mole, and the old man's crippled state, had thrown the whole maintenance of the family on the poor young widow, who was really working herself to death, while, repairs being impossible, the cottage was almost falling down. "Oh, what a place, and what a dear old man!" cried the ladies, as they went out. "Well, we can do something here. I'll come and read to him every week," exclaimed Dora. "And I will knit him a warm jacket," said Mary, "and surely Edmund could help them to prop up that wretched cottage." "What a struggle their lives must have been, and so patient and good! Where are we going now?"