The light carts which they drove were, in construction, practically flat boxes upon two wheels, on the front of which sat the driver, his legs dangling between the shafts. As they had no springs and ran behind horses to which ten miles an hour was the business of life, the rattle they made, as they came bowling along, left no one an excuse for being driven over who had not been born deaf. Those in the employ of the Kaims fishmongers would generally run in company, contending each mile hotly with men, who, like Jimmy Stirk, traded for themselves, and took the road in their own interests. More than forty years before the time of which I speak, Granny Stirk, then a strikingly handsome young woman, lived with her husband in the cottage which was still her home. Stirk, a cadger well known on the road for his blasphemous tongue and the joyfulness of his Saturday nights, was reported to be afraid of his wife, and it is certain that, but for her strong hand and good sense, he would have been a much less successful member of society. As it was, he managed to lead an almost decent life, and was killed, while still a young man, in an accident. Mrs. Stirk thus found herself a widow, with two little boys under ten, a cart, a couple of angular horses, and no male relations; in spite of the trouble she had had with him, she missed her man, and, after his funeral, prepared herself to contend with two things--poverty and the dulness of life. She cared little for the company of her own sex, and the way in which her widowhood cut her off from the world of men and movement galled and wearied her. So it was from inclination as well as necessity that she one day mounted the cart in her husband’s vacant place, and appeared at Kaims after the boats came in, to be greeted with the inevitable jeers. But the jeers could not stop her shrewd purchasing, nor alter the fact that she had iron nerves and a natural judgment of pace, and in the market she was soon let alone as one with whom it was unprofitable to bandy words. For curses she cared little, having heard too many; to her they were light things to encounter in the fight for her bread, her children, and the joy of life. Her position became assured one day, when, after a time of scarcity in the fish-market, a good haul held out the prospect of an unusual sale inland. A string of cadgers who had started before Mrs. Stirk were well out on the road when she appeared from a short-cut considered unfit for wheels, and, having hung shrewdly to their skirts, passed them just outside Blackport, her heels on the shaft, her whip ostentatiously idle, and her gold earrings swinging in her ears.