"You should see my little girls; they are the dearest children, though I say it. Often and often have they fallen down on their knees and asked the blessed Jesus to send us food." She told me how when they had once done so she looked into the garden, and saw, as she thought, one of the children's pocket-handkerchiefs. It proved to be a stranger's, and in the corner tied up in a knot was a shilling. The eldest child, she said, had been in the infirmary at Hastings with a bad leg, and was obliged to have it cut. "When," she continued, "the child was going to be put on the operating-table, the surgeon came and said, 'Now, Amanda dear, we are going to cut your leg.' ' Very well, sir,' she replied, 'I am ready; only give me five minutes that I may go into the lavatory.' 'What for?' 'That I may ask God to give me strength to bear it'"
The poor woman concluded by a bitter invective against the guardians. "Only let me be guardian for a week," she exclaimed, "and see what I'd do! Think of giving little children meat such as you would not give to hogs! Think of waking little children up at six in the morning, and not letting them have anything again until twelve! Would you like it? Of course they are hungry-like. Six hours be a long time for a child to wait. And then when they are sick, to have to apply to the Board, and perhaps wait a fortnight. It's a shame. Ah! that ——— is a brute. I should like to scrunch him, I should. He is a brute."
Near Waldron I met a bright, happy-faced boy, seventeen years old, who told me that he had worked ever since he was nine; left school then and went to service—first for fourpence a day, then for sixpence, then for eightpence, then for eighteenpence, then for two shillings; now he works in the fields, has eight shillings a week, and will shortly be raised. Some had lately gone from those parts to New Zealand, but he did not care to emigrate as long as he had two hands and there was work to be done. He went to a nightschool in winter, and gets on there a good bit; has a few books—"The Negro Servant," and a book about "Noah's Ark," and "The Tower of Babel," which he has read over and over again.
This boy had worked ever since he was nine. Sufficiently
