“Couldn’t you eat your geese?”
“Eat our geese! No, indeed; they had to be sold to pay the rent.”
“Rent for living in a quagmire! I should think you ought to be paid for living there.”
“Rent! yes; and high rent, too. Why, there’s tallow enough in that candle on the table to last a fen cottager three weeks.”
“I don’t see why a candle shouldn’t burn out as fast in England as here.”
“They would make that candle into ever so many rush-lights.”
“What’s a rush-light?”
“They take a bulrush, and take the skin off from each side down to the white pith, leaving a little strip of skin on the edge to stiffen it, and make it stand up,—that is for a wick; then they dip it a few times in melted tallow, and make a light of it; but it’s a little, miserable light.”
“I shouldn’t think they could see to read by it.”
“There’s but very few of them can read. They don’t have schools, as they do here: and the poor people can’t send their children, for so soon as a child is big enough to open a gate, or turn a wheel, or mind another child, run of errands, hold a horse, or scare the rooks and the birds from the grain, they are obliged to put that child to work, in order to live and pay rent.