Mrs. Clough having, by ocular demonstration, satisfied herself that Bess was a sufficiently notable house-wife and a kindly nurse, had replaced the worn out long-clothes which Jabez inherited from “brother Joe,” by a set of more serviceable and suitable short ones; had, moreover, sent an embrocation to allay Simon’s rheumatic pains, and to crown the whole, supplied a go-cart for the boy, to help him to walk, and yet leave the hands of industrious Bess at liberty. As Miss Jewsbury has said, in her exquisite story of “The Rivals,” that go-cart “was the drop added to the brimming cup, the touch given to the falling column.” Mat’s worse-half—an inveterately clean woman, be it said—was occupied with her Saturday’s “redding up,” when she saw the wood-turner carry it in; and she thereupon trundled her mop at the door so vigorously and viciously, that the children instinctively shrank into corners, or ran out of the yard altogether, beyond reach of her weighty arm. And as, one by one, they ventured back, after what they thought a safe interval, creeping stealthily over the freshly-sanded floor, and mayhap leaving the impression of wet clogs thereon, jerks, cuffs, and slaps were administered with a freedom born of her supposed wrongs. When Mat came home, to offer his wages upon the household altar, the storm had not subsided, and he was fain to retreat to the quiet fireside of Simon to smoke his pipe in peace, and escape its pitiless peltings. He could not have selected a worse haven. It was a flagrant going over to the enemy. Thither she followed him in her wrath, and in her blind fury assailed not only him, but Bess, Simon, Mr. Clough, and Joshua Brookes, whom she mingled in indiscriminate confusion, casting aspersions on the girl, which wounded nobody more than her own husband. In the midst and in spite of all this, Jabez grew apace. Life was not altogether sweetened for him by Mrs. Clough’s kindness, only made a little less bitter, and certainly not less hard; since almost his first experience with the go-cart was to tilt at the open doorway, and pitch head-foremost down a flight of three steps into the stony yard, whence frightened Bess raised him, with a bleeding nose and a great bump on his forehead, amidst the mocking laughter of Sal Cooper. A chair was overturned across the doorway as a barrier, until Simon could place a sliding foot-board there. But Jabez had still many a knock against chair or table until Bess made a padded roll for his forehead, as a protective coronal. Then every tooth cost him a convulsion, and any one less patient and tender hearted than Bess would have abandoned her self-imposed charge in despair, his accidents and ailments made such inroads on her rest and on her time.