[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE BABES IN THE WOOD.
EVERY ONE knows the lines in "The Babes in the Wood"—
"These pretty Babes, hand-in-hand,
Went wandering up and down;"
* * * * *
"And when they saw the darksome night,
They sat them down and cried."
Yes, it came to that with Janet's little darlings. That they had taken a southerly direction, following the railway away from, instead of towards, Liverpool, or any other place they knew, really did not matter in the least. Their enterprise was an impossible one in any case. They tried hard to keep the railway in sight, but the roads did not lie near it, and in finding easy places to creep through or over fences they wandered from it, and finally failed to find it again. This was a great relief to Fred, but Frank felt more lost than ever.
They bought bread as long as they had pence to pay for it, then they begged in good earnest, getting sometimes a little food, sometimes a penny, sometimes a hard word. They slept under a tree, or where they could; that is, Fred slept, and Frank lay as quiet as he could, and kept Fred warm, dozing at intervals and awaking in the grey dawn shivering and hardly able to get up from the ground.
Then the weather changed: it blew and rained, and the nights were cold.
Except to give them a little charity, no one took any notice of them. They looked much like any other little beggars, and if people thought about them at all, they probably concluded that they belonged to some party, and that their comrades were waiting just out of sight. It was a thinly inhabited country district; they begged only at solitary houses, and there were no policemen about, as would have been the case in any town.
There is a village in Gloucestershire which I shall call Edgestone, a large village with numerous inhabitants, mostly poor, industrious people. It had a clergyman, of course, and a doctor—and, I believe, a lawyer. Most of the men were labourers employed on the large farms which surrounded the village; their wives and children lived in more or less comfort, according to the thrift or unthrift of their parents, in the rows of cottages which formed the street. The church—a beautiful old building—stood in the middle of the village. Beyond it there was a large green, on which the children played and geese wandered about at pleasure; at the side furthest from the church was the schoolhouse, and a few houses of the better sort, with gardens; then the street again, but this part of it was very short.
In these houses on the green, the doctor and the few gentry of the place lived. The road to the village from the east lay through farms and orchards, with here and there a cottage. As one came nearer Edgestone, the cottages were more numerous, until at last you found yourself in the street.