CHAPTER VI.

WHILE the Rector was thoroughly enjoying the luxury of a most appétissant little repast in his warm, snug study, his well-covered body reclining in his great easy chair, his slippered feet on an ottoman by the blazing fire, and his little dinner-table drawn up in front of it, the very personification of full bachelor enjoyment; and Maude presiding at her richly served table, spread with many dainties and ornamented by glittering plate and polished glass; a very different scene was being enacted in a hovel of the fen land of which they had been speaking that morning.

In a miserable, ill-built dwelling, more like a shed than a human habitation, standing in a plot of land by courtesy called a garden, and now almost entirely under water, were assembled the family of one of the labourers of the outlying fen farm belonging to Willingham Manor.

On a dirty, filthy bed, in the corner of the largest of the two rooms which the house contained, lay a bed-ridden grandmother, her face wrinkled more by pain and debauchery than age, her elf locks strag gling from under her torn, greasy cap, and her wild, sunken eyes rolling hither and thither, with a craving, longing expression, very miserable to behold, while her haggard features seemed pinched to extremity by want, cold, and hunger.

Another bed there was in the opposite corner, if bed it could be called, which looked more like a heap of old clothes and rags; the third corner was occupied by some straw, and the fourth by two large broken crocks, above which were a couple of rough shelves, containing the whole stock of household utensils and provisions,-a very small stock it was,— three tea-cups, all handleless, and one cracked, a much

injured tea-pot, four mugs, half-a-dozen knives and forks, none perfect, about ten plates, three or four basins, a tin can, and some five or six mutilated jugs; one loaf of bread, a little packet of wretched-looking tea, half a basin of sugar, and a pint bottle with the remains of some adulterated gin, completed, with the addition of a broken table, four chairs, and some old boxes, the list of Jack Radford's household furniture.

Seven miserable, half-starved, sickly-looking children, were quarrelling together in the middle of the room; the mother, a gaunt, untidy woman, with tattered clothes and slip-shod shoes, was trying to make the fire burn, while the baby (whom she had laid down for the purpose) was shrieking louder than you would have fancied, from its squalid features and shrunken form, it possibly could have done. Radford himself had just returned home wet to the skin, tired, hungry, and loaded with a plough-share, which he had had to go two miles round to bring from the blacksmith's, and was therefore in no very good humour.

"What, no fire again!" he exclaimed, as he threw down his burden with a violence which startled and quieted the children; "a pretty thing indeed on such an evening as this."

"The peat's wet, and won't burn, you know," returned the woman, again applying herself, but very lazily, to blowing the refractory embers with her mouth.

"I know you're the worst wife that ever man was cursed with," muttered the husband sullenly, and he shook his wet clothes so vehemently, that some of the drops fell on the face of the old woman. She uttered a wild oath, and bade her daughter teach the man better manners than that, and be hanged to her.

Sally rose from her knees before the fire, and as she turned slowly to see what was the matter, the spark of fire she had just succeeded in kindling went out, and the man uttering a fearful curse, roughly seized

on her arm, and bade her mind her business, for an idle slut as she was, if she did not wish to be turned out of doors, mother and all.

This produced an angry retort from the woman, who freeing her arm, dealt him a blow with her fist, which put the crowning point to Radford's now towering passion.

A fearful scene ensued; as the father beat the woman he had sworn to cherish and protect, while she with virago vehemence now pulled his hair and whiskers out by the roots, and now dashed her nails into his cheek; the children slunk whimpering into a corner, the elder girl snatching the baby out of the way, for she knew by experience how little the parents remembered their children when thus forgetting themselves. The old woman stormed and raved, and swore at the affliction which prevented her rising to assist her daughter in this wretched struggle.

It was a spectacle to make human nature shudder at itself, and shrink from its species; yet such scenes were not uncommon in the Fens, especially in winter, when the home comforts which could not be procured, or were sacrificed for the sake of the gin-bottle, were more missed. The women and children had no work to do, and the men had more time to witness the discomfort of home.

And why was all this? Radford had been a very respectable man once; and when he first came to live in the Fens, and took his late father-in-law's place and cottage, he and it were the admired and envied of all the rude, ignorant people round. But this did not last long: first the garden began to look neglected, then the house grew untidy, then its inmates, and finally Radford and his family were rather worse than better off than their neighbours.

And what was the cause of this sad distinction of the Fen people? The radical evil and true cause was the want of any practical religion among them ; and this arose from various circumstances.

They

were several miles distant from the Church. In winter the road was very nearly impassable-often quite so, on foot; in summer it was a broiling, dusty walk, which, going and returning, took up very nearly all their day of rest. Still, perhaps, many would have gone if they had been reminded of their duty, and stirred up to its practice; but they never were. Nobody seemed to care about them or their welfare, either spiritual or temporal.

From year's end to year's end they fagged on, seldom associating with each other except at the beershop or in the field, never with any one else; and the LORD's day was marked only by its affording more hours to bestow on idle gossip, or ale-house revellings. The wives, idle and slatternly, lolled about in their houses when there was no work to do in the fields, or stepped down themselves to the beershop to hear if any news was up; and when they had full work, slaved and toiled away, and let their homes and husbands run a little faster to ruin than they otherwise would.

There was no school for the children; if there had been, few, if any, would have gone. So soon as they were at all old enough, they were taken by different farmers to watch their fields, or tend and drive pigs or sheep on the waste marsh-land; and thus the boys every day, and all day long, were wandering about alone, becoming more and more like the brutes they tended. The girls, either in the fields with their mothers, or at home nursing the baby, or idling, with only the example of such mothers before them, and receiving little instruction, but a good many ratings and beatings, were gradually degenerating into even worse specimens of depraved feminine nature than were those of the preceding generation, when the Fen land had begun to be more inhabited.

Formerly it had been so much waste, unreclaimed land, with only two or three squatters' mud dwellings in its whole extent; but as cultivation advanced, and

draining progressed, a few of the more enterprising farmers and landholders took in the once unheeded marsh-land, cut deep ditches, drained, worked, improved; sent out first one man and then another to build himself a hut on the place, that he might be within easy reach of his work, and have an eye to his master's property,-till hovel after hovel was run up, a beerhouse and shop started, and the Fen land had a village of its own: widely straggling, it is true, but still a village, and with a considerable population, to be left to become-what man will and does become when separated from everything calculated to rouse and exercise his higher and nobler qualities-only a degree above the creatures of whom he is the lord.

The houses were all ill built, situated in low, marshy ground, as yet not half sufficiently drained. The shop sold its goods at a very high price, but was so conveniently near, few went further to supply their wants at a cheaper rate. The beerhouse, with its warm room and stimulating liquors, was a very tempting resort from the cold, damp, dreary landscape without; while sickness of one sort and the other, chiefly ague and low fever, was seldom absent long together from any of their habitations; and all these things operated slowly, but surely, in reducing the Fen people (though some of them had higher wages and all lower rent than their fellows in the more inland parts) to a state of poverty rarely seen among our agricultural labourers, while the same causes, aided by others, were also fast demoralising them.

The distance from Church and difficulty of access has been mentioned, as well as the total absence of all sort of instruction for the younger portion of the Fen population. There was the ordinary dame's school at Willingham, it is true, and a very good one it was; but farther off than the Church by a mile, and very completely filled into the bargain. Besides, the Fen people soon lost all desire of sending their children anywhere for learning; the more pressing demands