So passed the years of my friend's early manhood. He was familiar with care; poverty was his abiding portion. A young family gathered round his knee; which he tried to bring up in less ignorance than had been his early lot, but whom he could not always keep less hungry. Thomas had many times difficulty in providing his household with a sufficiency of coarse dry bread. Insufficiently nourished his children were weakly and stunted; little able to wrestle with disease. His two eldest boys were sent to work for good at the age of ten; and the younger of the two died through exposure and hunger before he was twelve. The girls were kept longer at home, hard though the fight for life was; but the third boy (Thomas) was taken on at Squire Hawthorn's own farm, at 2s. per week, when he was little over nine. That same year, Thomas himself had had a fine spell of harvesting; and his wife, having no new baby to provide for, had saved a few shillings by selling vegetables from the allotment garden, to people in Warwick town, so that the winter was faced by the couple in better heart than they had known almost since the day they were married. A pound or two in hand after meeting the bills that the harvest money had to pay! Surely greater bliss no man could know. The thought of such riches made Thomas declare that he might yet escape the workhouse, as, thank God, his father had done. Already, though not forty years old, the shadow of that accursed refuge of the English poor had begun to loom over Thomas's future, grim and horrible as the gate of Hell. As he thought, in his hours of bitterness, of whither his endless toil was carrying him, of the sole "good" that the Take-alls left to him and such as him, he set his teeth and cursed his country. Nor would he believe that for this he had been born. His soul was bitter within him, and, young as he yet was, hard work and harder fare were telling on his stalwart frame.