So old Mrs.Welden prattled on.

About her good days, when she was young, and was kitchenmaid at the parsonage in a village twenty miles away; about her marriage with a young farm labourer; about his "steady" habits, and the comfort they had together, in spite of the yearly arrival of a new baby, and the crowding of the bit of a cottage his master allowed them.

Ten of 'em, and it had been "up before sunrise, and a good bit of hard work to keep them all fed and clean." But she had not minded that until Jack died quite sudden after a sunstroke.

It was odd how much colour her rustic phraseology held.

She made Betty see it all.
The apparent natural inevitableness of their being turned out of the cottage, because another man must have it; the years during which she worked her way while the ten were growing up, having measles, and chicken pox, and scarlet fever, one dying here and there, dropping out quite in the natural order of things, and being buried by the parish in corners of the ancient church yard.