Some of his sharpest bullets were fired from a double-barrelled gun. 'Well, Mrs. Edwards, I hear you and Evan Evans are about to make a match of it at last. How soon is this fine young man of yours to have a step-father?'
A frown darkened the brow of Rhys, and an indignant retort was on his tongue, but, before a second word was uttered, the frown changed to a significant smile at a look from his mother.
It was an open secret at the farm that Ales and Evan were courting, and only waited until they had saved enough money to set up housekeeping and farming for themselves, as husband and wife.
Had Mr. Pryse but known it, there was an element of disquiet and rebellion at Brookside Farm, of which he might have taken advantage.
But he never gave a second thought to the boy whose walls he had levelled so wantonly. He had not seen that same boy, his passion over, pick up every scattered bit of stone, and patiently raise his walls once more.
He had no suspicion how the strong will and pertinacity of that three years child would come later into collision with the mastership of his eldest brother, or the important part these stone chips would play in William's life, or how they might affect the welfare of the whole county, or make an enduring name when his own was forgotten.
CHAPTER X. FRIENDS AND BROTHERS.
There was no necessity for Mr. Pryse to suggest 'employment' for little William. In the last century, and far into this, children were set to work and expected to earn their own living at a wofully early age, and that long before machinery came into use and drove them into factories to be the slaves of brutal overseers, who scored their six and eight year old backs with weals from whip or stick on the slightest provocation. William Hutton, the historian, tells how he, a small child of seven years, was apprenticed, in 1730, to an overseer of Lombe's silk mill, in Derby, how he had to wear high pattens to reach the machine, had to rise at five in the depth of winter and hurry to work, slipping down on the ice as he ran, and how he was beaten till his back was all festering sores. And this was no uncommon case. I, who write this, can remember when the little barefooted children went to the cotton factories and print works at five in the morning, and worked till seven or eight at night.