those people a right to their pleasure? Was not the land theirs, by theft or fraud it might be, but still theirs by a power none dared gainsay? All that was as clear as day, and religion itself was distinctly on the side of the upper classes. The Church through its tithes shared in their exclusive privileges, and the parson of the parish was a diligent guardian of property. On the rare occasions when he preached a sermon his theme was the duty of the poor to be contented and obedient. Men who dared to think, he classed as rioters, who, like poachers and rick-burners, were an abomination to the Lord. Who so dared to question the divine order of British society, deserved, in the parson's view, everlasting death. Wealth, in short, according to this beautiful gospel, was for them that had it or could steal it within the lines of the constitution, and for the poor there was degradation, hunger, rags, and, by way of hope, a chance of the pauper's heaven. It must be all right, of course; but somehow, gradually, to little Thomas it did not appear so. Very young and ignorant as he was, strange thoughts began to stir within him. At home he saw his father sinking more and more into the hopeless state of a man whose only earthly hope was the parish workhouse; he saw his mother beaten to the earth with the weary work of rearing a family of six children, without the means of giving them enough to eat. One by one these went out, like himself, from their little three-roomed cottage to try and earn the bread they needed. The girls worked in the fields like the rest. All were, like himself, uneducated, and, in spite of all, the wolf could hardly be kept from the door when bread was dear, as it often was in those days. His father's wages never averaged more than 8s. a-week the year round. But what did that matter? Had not the parish provided a poorhouse, and did it not give bread of a kind to every miserable groundling whom it could not drive beyond its bounds? They ought surely to have been contented. Yet Thomas, who saw and often felt their hunger, and contrasted it with the coarse profusion at the farm, and the pampered condition of the squire's menials at the Grange--he doubted many things. The sight of a meeting of fox-hunters, and of the rush of their horses across the cultivated land, filled him with wrath even then. The life he saw around him had no unity in it. Thus it happened that, by the time he was 13, though still stunted in body, he had begun to assert some amount of dogged independence, and was driven away from Whitbury farm because he flew at his drunken master for striking him with the waggoner's whip.