“And _then_, my dear sir,” said Mr. Ammaby, “I shall be able to get some men to do some work about my place, and those people at a distance who have widows here will relieve them (at least the widows will look up their well-to-do relatives), and the Church, in your person, will not be charged. And some of the widows will consent to scrub for payment, instead of sitting weeping in your kitchen—also for payment. They will, furthermore, compel their interesting sons to mind pigs, or scare birds, instead of hanging about the Heart of Oak, begging of the visitors who now begin to invade us. Do you know that the very boys won’t settle to work, that the children are taking to gutter-life and begging, that the women won’t even tidy up their houses, and that the men are retailing the horrors of the fever in every alehouse in the county, instead of getting in the crops? I give you my word, I had to go down to the inn yesterday, and a lad of eleven or twelve, who didn’t recognize me in Chuter’s dark kitchen, came up and began to beg with a whine that would have done credit to a professional mendicant. I stood in the shadow and let him tell his whole story, of a widowed mother and three brothers and sisters living, and six dead; and when he’d finished, and two visitors were fumbling in their pockets, I took him by the collar and lifted him clean through the kitchen and down the yard into the street. I nearly knocked Swift over, or rather I nearly fell myself, from concussion with his burly person, but he was the very man I wanted. I said, ‘Mr. Swift, may I ask you to do me a favor? This boy—whose father was a respectable man—has been begging—_begging_! in a public room. His excuse is that his mother is starving. Will you kindly take him to the Hall, and put him in charge of the gardener, with my strict orders that he is to do a good afternoon’s work at weeding in the shrubbery. And that the gardener is to see that he comes every day at nine o’clock in the morning, and works there till four in the afternoon, till the day you reopen school, meal-times and Sundays excepted. I will pay his mother five shillings a week, and, if he is a good boy, I’ll give him some old clothes. And if ever you see or hear of his disgracing himself and his friends by begging again, if you don’t thrash him within an inch of his life, I shall.’ I promise you, the widow might starve for the want of that five shillings if the young gentleman could slip out of his bargain. His face was a study. But less so than the schoolmaster’s. The job exactly suited him, and I suspect he knew the lad of old.” “From what I’ve heard Swift say, I fancy he sympathizes with your theories,” said the Rector.