"So it is Tom dear," said his wife cheerily; "but that'll be all clear in no time.—Off with you, childer." And in a trice all the elder ones were scampering upstairs, laughing with glee, and carrying the greater part of their garments, of which they had already divested themselves, with them. "Go you, Polly," she said to a girl of perhaps eleven years old, "and tuck 'em all up—there's a dear."
Polly vanished after the rest. Her mother floundered about collecting oddments for a few minutes, talking volubly all the time, and giving her husband an amusing and graphic description of the dowser's appearance in Gravel-pit Lane. Tom dangled the baby as he listened, and swallowed his impatience as best he could, for there were no signs of supper. Annie was incorrigible, he knew, and he often felt he ought to make a stand against so much untidiness and unpunctuality; but Annie always disarmed him. Worn and weary, tired or ill, she always had a smile for him, and then she had one great and very rare virtue—she never made excuses. She never either denied her faults or tried to explain them away. Tom, like the vicar, sometimes wished she did, for it would have given him an excuse for scolding her; but she never did, and so he learned to put up with it all. And she had also another rare and excellent gift—she could control the children. She never "smacked" or scolded them, and she never nagged at them; but when she told them to do anything, somehow or other, sooner or later—sometimes, certainly, a little "later"—they always obeyed, and that without coercion.
In a few minutes there was quiet overhead, for the children were saying their prayers, and Tom sat down to the table, and ate heartily of some very good boiled bacon and a mess of cold beans, washed down with a couple of glasses of fromerty, a drink he had enjoyed a few years before in the hayfield and having asked and learned how it was made, had passed his knowledge on to Annie, who was always quick at anything in the way of cooking, and eager to add to her store of knowledge in that line, to her husband's lasting joy and her own comfort.
"Annie," he said, when he had finished and she had rocked the baby to sleep, "I've took on as a well hand—leastways I've said I will work with Martin, and I shall go and offer myself to-morrow at the meetin'."
Annie's face fell.
"O Tom, I wish you wouldn't. That's such terrible dangerous work, and what ever shall I do if yew get hurt?"
"No more dangerous than many other things. That's good pay, and some one must do it. There'll be a rare job to find the men for three wells, to be dug at once the doctor say."
"Three wells at once! well, that is a job! Which'll yew be at, I wonder? P'raps they'll set yew on the one atop a th' lane. That 'ud be nice and handy, and yew could run in for yer dinner. And what'll they giv yew a day due yew think, Tom?
"I'm sure I don't know. Not less than three bob, I'm thinking, and p'raps more when we git down deep."
"Three shillin's a day; why, that's eighteen shillin's a week, and us only gettin' twelve! Why, we'll sune grow rich like that, Tom!"