So parish overseers learnt to let the Degs alone; and their children regularly brought up to receive the parish money for their parents, were impatient as they grew up to receive it for themselves.  Marriages in the Deg family were consequently very early, and there were plenty of instances of married Degs claiming parish relief under the age of twenty, on the plea of being the parent of two children.  One such precocious individual being asked by a rather verdant officer why he had married before he was able to maintain a family, replied, in much astonishment, that he had married in order to maintain himself by parish assistance.  That he never had been able to maintain himself by his labor, nor ever expected to do it; his only hope, therefore, lay in marrying, and becoming the father of two children, to which patriarchal rank he had now attained, and demanded his “pay.”

Thus had lived and flourished the Degs on their ancient patrimony, the parish, for upward of two hundred years.  Nay, we have no doubt whatever that, if it could have been traced, they had enjoyed an ancestry of paupers as long as the pedigree of Sir Roger Rockville himself.  In the days of the most perfect villenage, they had, doubtless, eaten the bread of idleness, and claimed it as a right.  They were numerous, improvident, ragged in dress, and fond of an alehouse and of gossip.  Like the blood of Sir Roger, their blood had become peculiar through a long persistence of the same circumstances.  It was become pure pauper blood.  The Degs married, if not entirely among Degs, yet amongst the same class.  None but a pauper would dream of marrying a Deg.  The Degs, therefore, were in constitution, in mind, in habit, and in inclination, paupers.  But a pure and unmixed class of this kind does not die out like an aristocratic stereotype.  It increases and multiplies.  The lower the grade, the more prolific, as is sometimes seen on a large and even national scale.  The Degs threatened, therefore, to become a most formidable clan in the lower purlieus of Stockington, but luckily there is so much virtue even in evils, that one, not rarely, cures another.  War, the great evil, cleared the town of Degs.

Fond of idleness, of indulgence, of money easily got, and as easily spent, the Degs were rapidly drained off by recruiting parties during the last war.  The young men enlisted, and were marched away; the young women married soldiers that were quartered in the town from time to time, and marched away with them.  There were, eventually, none of the once numerous Degs left except a few old people, whom death was sure to draft off at no distant period with his regiment of the line which has no end.  Parish overseers, magistrates, and master manufacturers, felicitated themselves at this unhoped-for deliverance from the ancient family of the Degs.