The boys and girls of this generation have no conception how children were trained and treated a few generations back. Not the poor only. The children of even rich parents had to endure painful punishments both at school and at home, and were fed sparely on coarse food for their health's sake. The late noble Lord Shaftesbury related how he and a sister were well-nigh starved in their childhood through the negligence of parents and servants.
History and biography teem with such instances. So that when I state that William Edwards and Jonet were sent into their mother's fields to weed, and pick up stones, and scare the birds away from newly-sown lands before the boy was six years old, I cast no reflection on his mother, who had no experience of a different state of things.
Nay, for her time, she was enlightened, and being a woman with good natural feeling, she was careful they were not taxed beyond their strength, as she and her husband had been; but that children should spend their hours in play, when they were old enough to be of use, had never dawned on her imagination. She considered she was doing her duty by them in setting them early to work, especially as she was careful they should be taught to read also.
Davy worked in field and farm, alongside Rhys, without a murmur of hardship. And when Jonet was first set to feed the chickens, or to look for the eggs of hens that laid away, to pull peas or beans, or to shell the latter for the pot (peas were boiled in the pod), imitative William, always at her heels, and wanting to show his own cleverness, set himself to do likewise.
And so long as he set himself voluntarily to work to assist Jonet, he was busy as a bee, and proud of his doings. Or when his mother or Ales sent him hither or thither to fetch or carry, or directed him to perform small services, he was as willing and amenable to order as most boys of his age. But no sooner did Rhys take advantage of his precocious industry, and exercise an assumed right to command, and bid him do this or that, than William began to rebel.
He was docile enough to his brother as a teacher. He was more eager to learn to read than Rhys was to instruct. Davy and Jonet took their spelling and reading lessons as compulsory tasks—Davy placidly, and Jonet with uneasy disfavour—but William with an absolute desire to know.
He no sooner discovered that the Ten Commandments painted up in the church, and the inscriptions on the upright gravestones in the churchyard, were just made up of the alphabetical characters on his painted battledore, and that the big Bible his mother read aloud to them was all a mixture of the same letters, than a craving to penetrate the mystery of these combinations seized him. He felt he had achieved something when he made his first grand discovery on a headstone taller than himself; but when, at his request, Evan read out the inscription, his perplexity and curiosity increased.
It was singular to see the little fellow—he was short for his age—Sunday by Sunday tracing letter or word, with tiny finger, on some grey old slab, while his seniors were gossiping all around.
'I tell you what,' said Rhys to him one Sunday when so employed, 'you might have been born in a stone quarry. I'm sure you ought to live in one, you do be so fond of the dirty rubbish.'
'What's a stone quarry?' put in William, with wide-open eyes.