"At first all went well. John left off going to wakes and fairs, except on business; stuck to his trades; brought his garden into good order, and worked early and late, when he could spare time, at his two fields, while his wife helped him famously. If they had had a few pounds in hand, they would have had 'land and beeves.' "But the first year twins came—a boy and girl; and the next another girl, and then twins again, and so on. Before Mrs. Bodger was thirty she had nine hearty, healthy children, with a fair prospect of plenty more; while John was a broken man, soured, discontented, hopeless. No longer did he stride forth eagerly to his work, after kissing mother and babies; no longer did he hurry home to put a finishing-stroke to the potato-patch, or broadcast his oat crop; no longer did he sit whistling and telling stories of bygone feats at the fireside, while mending some wooden implement of his own, or making one for a neighbour. Languid and moody, he lounged to his task with round shoulders and slouching gait; spoke seldom—when he did, seldom kindly. His children, except the youngest, feared him, and his wife scarcely opened her lips, except to answer. "A long, hard, severe winter, and a round of typhus fever, which carried off two children, finished him. John Bodger was beaten, and obliged to sell his bit of land. He had borrowed money on it from the lawyer; while laid up with fever he had silently allowed his wife to run up a bill at 'The Shop.' When strong enough for work there was no work to be had. Lobbit saw his opportunity, and took it. John Bodger wanted to buy a cow, he wanted seed, he wanted to pay the doctor, and to give his boys clothes to enable them to go to service. He sold his land for what he thought would do all this and leave a few pounds in hand. He attended to sign the deed and receive money; when instead of the balance of twenty-five pounds he had expected, he received one pound ten shillings, and a long lawyer's bill _receipted_. "He did not say much; for poor countrymen don't know how to talk to lawyers, but he went toward home like a drunken man; and, not hearing the clatter of a horse behind him that had run away, was knocked down, run over, and picked up with his collar-bone and two ribs broken. "The next day he was delirious; in the course of a fortnight he came to his senses, lying on a workhouse bed. Before he could rise from the workhouse bed, not a stick or stone had been left to tell where the cottage of his fathers had stood for more than two hundred years, and Mr. Joseph Lobbit had obtained, in auctioneering phrase, a magnificent estate of five hundred acres within a ring fence.