She lived entirely alone and supported herself, not by any of the special kinds of work which are supposed generally to be possible to the blind, but by exactly the same means as other women of her age and class.  All the work in the house was done by herself, even to the making of the toffee and bulls’-eyes, which she sold at the cricket-matches and fairs of the districts.  She kept hens and turkeys, and worked in her garden, feeling her way about the beds and bushes with her feet.  She sold the vegetables and the currants and gooseberries which grew in the little patch of garden, and her friend, Anne Hilton, carried her eggs to the market-town for her every week, where she disposed of them to a provision-dealer of the same denomination.  Even the hen-run had been made by the blind woman, who was a continual source of astonishment and questioning from the neighbours.  But in this wonder, she not unnaturally found a pathetic pleasure.

“How do you know when you’ve got all your hens in?” asked a child once.

“I count them at night when they’re asleep on their perches,” answered Mary, with a joyful little chuckle.

“But it’s dark!” objected the child.

“So it is,” replied Mary.  “I didn’t think of that.”

She never referred to her blindness, and so complete a victory over misfortune and circumstance gained its fit respect in the country.  No one considered that it was “doing a charity” to Mary to drive past her cottage on the way from market to give her news of a football match or fair about to be held in the district.  Women would send their children on their way to school to give similar news, and the boy who brought her the roll of newspapers, which she sold at the station every morning, would often wheel her barrow for her.  She had a large, clumsy chest on the frame of an old perambulator, in which she wheeled about her store of aerated waters, toffee, and newspapers.  She would place herself at the gate of the cricket ground on Saturday afternoon.  The sliding lid of her chest made a counter on which she set her scales and her neatly cut pile of paper for wrapping up the toffee.  She had no rivals in the district, for the most avaricious small shop-keeper would have been ashamed to confuse or trouble the simple, good, courageous woman.  Perhaps the most complete sign of her triumph over her disability was, that no one dreamed of calling her “Poor Mary.”  Like her friend, Anne Hilton, she was a member of the little wayside chapel, which, with all that it meant, made a centre of warmth and fellowship for both lonely women.

CHAPTER VI