Ease from debt she had never known; but here at Wroote the clouds seemed to be breaking.

Duns had been fewer of late.

With her poultry-yard and small dairy she was earning a few pounds, and this gave her a sense of helpfulness she had not known at Epworth; a pound saved may be a pound gained, but a pound earned can be held in the hand, and the touch makes a wonderful difference.

The girls had flung themselves heartily into the farm-work: they talked of it, at night, around the kitchen hearth (for of the two sitting-rooms one had been given up to their father for his library, and the other Hetty vowed to be "too grand for the likes of dairy-women." Also the marsh-vapours in the Isle of Axholme can be agueish after sunset, even in summer, and they found the fire a comfort).

Hetty had described these rural economies in a long letter to Samuel at Westminster, and been answered by an "Heroick Poem," pleasantly facetious: "The spacious glebe around the house Affords full pasture to the cows, Whence largely milky nectar flows, O sweet and cleanly dairy!" "Unless or Moll, or Anne, or you, Your duty should neglect to do, And then 'ware haunches black and blue By pinching of a fairy." -- With much in the same easy vein about "sows and pigs and porkets," and the sisters' housewifely duties: "Or lusty Anne, or feeble Moll, Sage Pat or sober Hetty." And the sisters were amused by the lines and committed them to heart.
They had learnt of the pleasures of life mainly through books; and now their simple enjoyment was, as it were, more real to them because it could be translated into verse.