“Yes, thank God!” was the unmistakably sincere reply of the man. “I’ve bin in work most o’ the time the last four months, ain’t I, mother?—but we knows what it is to have nothin’ inside, and because we have to get used to the feel of a hungry belly it ain’t to say we likes it. D’you know, Rye, many’s the time I’ve gone to sleep for an hour or two in the daytime when I couldn’t get no work, so I could forget I was hungry.”
At this point the wife addressed me, proffering the advice—
“Don’t you never go near——; she’s a bad lot, you’ll know her anywhere if you meet her ’cos she’s got a mouth like a ’oss collar. She be a lippety tippoty sort, ain’t no good to nobody; besides, she’s got a awful temper on her; as for me, d’ye know, I could keep my temper for seven year; d—n you, you are clumsy,” this being said in the same breath to her child, who had, presumably, got up from bed for a drink of water and had upset the can; she then straightway continued talking as though no interruption had occurred, and chattered on from one subject to another with scarcely a break—
“My husband can read, you know, and he had a paper lent him that had got in it all about a big boat sinking,—nearly everybody was drowned, it said, pani-mushes and all.
“It’s my belief the world’s got too full o’ people and that’s the way the Almighty’s got o’ thinnin’ ’em out. Lord save us all, ain’t it awful to think of ’em all alive same as you and me and then——!
“Yes, my Rye, this country’s good enough for me. Starvation’s ahead next winter for some of us I dare say—but then, folks can starve in Canada too.
“Do you know, as we was sittin’ here last week, one of them aeroplanes come nearly over right up there,—I don’t believe in them things,—if we was meant to fly I’m certain the Almighty would ha’ given us a pair o’ wings apiece.”
In this way her tongue ran on. At length she asked—
“Are you an invalid in your left hand? Why do you hold it like that?”
This curiously expressed inquiry was suggested by the position in which I was holding my hand to relieve pain caused by carrying a heavy camera during several days of wandering.