“Jerusalem!” said Joe Griffin; “I did not think there were any people in this world so ignorant as that. They don’t know so much as a yellow dog. Were the people where you lived so ignorant?”
“No; they were Wesleyan Methodists, and their children were taught to read and write. It is in the mines where the greatest ignorance is. We lived in the fens.”
“What is the fens?”
“What we call the fens is the greater part of it low, flat land, which has some time been under water; but the water has been drained off by canals and ditches, and pumped out with windmills, and now the most of it bears the greatest crops of any land in England. But there are some places so low that they could not be drained.
“Such was the place where we lived, which was so wet that nothing could grow but sallies and alders. No cattle could be kept; so the people keep geese and ducks instead. The geese and ducks are their cattle.”
“But geese and ducks won’t give milk,” said Joe.
“Well, some of them make out to keep a cow, and others a goat or two; and the others get their milk where they can, or go without.”
“What do these people do for a living?”
“They are basket-makers and coopers. Alders grow taller and straighter there than they do here; and they make baskets of the sallies, and hoops both of the sallies and alders.
“The fens are full of frogs, and bugs, and worms, and the fowl get their living. We had hundreds of geese and ducks, and picked them three or four times a year. But the folks are poor there—them that are poor. We hardly ever saw any meat from year’s end to year’s end.”