Dan declared it was all the cunning of them, for fear Judith should become chargeable to the parish, and there! her fine friends would die, or give her up, or she would just be thrown on the parish, and passed on to a strange workhouse, and then she would see what she got by leaving her kin. It was just like their sly tricks! In point of fact, if Judith had become chargeable to the parish, Dan's remarks would have been equally true of Uphill, whence she would have been handed to the place where her father had lived, and it was the object of every place to dispose of all superfluous paupers. But Dan and Molly wished her to imagine them willing to keep her freely, in case of a failure of the supplies! Poor thing! They really thought that their opposition had induced her to drop the idea, and that it was for their own ease, or the good of the rates, that the Carbonel ladies had tried to persuade her to leave them. Molly did not forbid the ladies the house--there was too much to be made out of the pickings from their presents--so Judith did not lose the cheerfulness and comfort they brought her; but Dan laid up the proposal in his mind as another cause of hatred and ill-will to Captain Carbonel. CHAPTER FIFTEEN. SCALES OF JUSTICE. "Thou hast appointed justices of peace to call poor men before them for matters they were not able to answer."--_Shakespeare_. When the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares was spoken, the Blessed and only Wise foresaw the extreme difficulty of rooting out the tares without injuring the wheat, when the work is done by the ignorant or hasty hands of the servants. So it was at Uphill. Captain Carbonel was made a county magistrate, and thus had more power in his hands, and his most earnest wish and prayer was to use it for the good of the parish. But things were very difficult. At the vestry, the farmers agreed with him that Barton and Morris ought not to have additional parish relief, great strong men as they were, who had both refused extra hours of labour offered by farmers, of a kind they did not like, and now demanded help on the score of their large families. In fact, it had become the custom to demand relief for every fresh child that was born, and the men were often idle in consequence. There were men with many children who had never come on the parish, because they were trustworthy and sober, and their wives were thrifty. Each magistrate could point to several of these, and each knew how the small and struggling ratepayers were oppressed. Nor could it be fair that these men should be maintained in idleness or dawdling at the expense of the hard-working small shopkeepers.