He would fain have made all his family join in the secession; but Johnnie would not be kept away from Sunday School; and Molly had heard rumours of penny clubs and of prizes at Christmas so, though the other children were very irregular, she kept them on after a fashion. CHAPTER ELEVEN. AN UNPROFITABLE CROP. "My mother bids me bind my hair."--_Old Ballad_. "Oh Mary, Mary, what is to be done about the hair?" cried Sophy, one Sunday after church. "Isn't it dreadful?" said Dora. "Those fearful curl-papers sticking out with rolls of old newspapers! I told them it was not fit to be seen last Sunday, but there were even Elizabeth and Jane Hewlett in them to-day." "Yes," said Mary, "they said that mother's aunt was coming to tea, so she had curled them before they came out. I told them I would excuse it for this once, but that I should send any one home who came such a figure on Sunday." Elizabeth and Jane, be it observed, were George Hewlett's daughters, the most civilised, if the dullest-witted, of the flock. Polly, Betsy, and Judy were the children of Dan Hewlett. As a rule, all the old women of the parish were called Betty, all the middle-aged Lizzie, and the girls Elizabeth. "It is worse on week-days," said Dora. "One would think it was a collection of little porcupines!" "And so dirty," began Sophy, but she was hushed up, for Edmund was seen approaching, and Mary never allowed him to be worried with the small, fretting details of school life. It was a time when it was the fashion for young ladies up to their teens to have their hair curled in ringlets round their heads or on their shoulders. Sophy's hair curled naturally, and had been "turned up" ever since she had come to live at home in the dignity of fourteen, but she and both her sisters wore falls of drooping ringlets in front, and in Mary's case these had been used to be curled in paper at night, though she would as soon have been seen thus decorated by day as in her night-cap. But there was scarcely another matron in the parish who did not think a fringe of curl-paper the proper mode of disposing of her locks when in morning _desabille_, unless she were elderly and wore a front, which could be taken off and put on with the best cap. Maid-servants wore short curls or smooth folds round side-combs under net caps, and this was the usual trim of the superior kind of women. The working women wore thick muslin white caps, under which, it was to be hoped, their hair was cut short, though often it straggled out in unseemly elf-locks. Married women did not go bareheaded, not even the younger ladies, except in the evening, when, like their maiden sisters, they wore coils of their back hair round huge upright ornamental combs on the summit of their heads.