“He sleeps still.”
“I shiver very much!” said the mother. “It’s a cold day. Pray shut the window Warner. I see the drops upon the pane; it is raining. I wonder if the persons below would lend us one block of coal.”
“We have borrowed too often,” said Warner.
“I wish there were no such thing as coal in the land,” said his wife, “and then the engines would not be able to work; and we should have our rights again.”
“Amen!” said Warner.
“Don’t you think Warner,” said his wife, “that you could sell that piece to some other person, and owe Barber for the money he advanced?”
“No!” said her husband shaking his head. “I’ll go straight.”
“And let your children starve,” said his wife, “when you could get five or six shillings at once. But so it always was with you! Why did not you go to the machines years ago like other men and so get used to them?”
“I should have been supplanted by this time,” said Warner, “by a girl or a woman! It would have been just as bad!”
“Why there was your friend Walter Gerard; he was the same as you, and yet now he gets two pound a-week; at least I have often heard you say so.”