Of no account

by Ruth Lamb

The speaker, Adam Livesey, was a man whose appearance suggested that the world had dealt hardly with him, and that he had found life, regarded as a journey, very rough travelling.

He was spare of form, rugged of feature, not given to much talking, but usually civil spoken, and not unpleasant in manner. There was, however, one exception. Adam Livesey was deemed surly by those who ventured to interfere with what he considered his strictly private affairs. He might not say in so many words, "Mind your own business, and let mine alone. It's a hard case that a quiet fellow cannot be left to himself by folk that are nothing to him. I wasn't meddling with you." But he looked all this and more.

If Adam could have been induced to open his mind to anybody, he would have summed up his experience by saying that, all through life, he had received "more kicks than ha'pence."

A clever lad, he would have done credit to good schooling, but could not get it. Just as he was beginning to understand the value of learning, his father died, and Adam had to go to work. The years that followed were marked by scanty fare, rough treatment, and small wages, which went to the support of those at home, who were younger and more helpless than himself.

In after days, Adam seldom spoke of his mother, but the neighbours described her as being "of a sour sort."

Mrs. Livesey was always engaged in a struggle for bare bread, so had little time, even if she felt the inclination, to indulge in acts of motherly tenderness. The house was cheerless, for she went out washing and cleaning. There was no girl to attend to it and the younger boys, so the place looked desolate to the weary lad when he returned from work before his mother's arrival.

It had been different when the father was living, but then Mrs. Livesey had only to stay with her children and use for the common benefit good wages, regularly placed in her hands.

With a husband to lean on and look up to, she stood firmly enough. Without him, she was like a climbing plant from which the prop has been withdrawn. She became limp and comparatively lifeless.

But the plant which has lost its first support often stretches out new shoots in search of a fresh one, and throws its clinging tendrils round some new source of strength, which will lift it from the ground.

Not so Mrs. Livesey. To use her own words, "When my husband died, I just gave up. I've never had a bit of spirit for anything since. I drag on somehow, and that's all I can say."