He relates how another working-man, being on tramp, came to St. Helens, in Lancashire, and there looked up an old friend.  He found him in a miserable, damp cellar, scarcely furnished; and when my poor friend went in, there sat poor Jack near the fire, and what did he, think you? why he sat and mended his wife’s stockings with the bodkin; and as soon as he saw his old friend at the door-post, he tried to hide them.  But Joe, that is my friend’s name, had seen it, and said:  “Jack, what the devil art thou doing?  Where is the missus?  Why, is that thy work?” and poor Jack was ashamed, and said:  “No, I know this is not my work, but my poor missus is i’ th’ factory; she has to leave at half-past five and works till eight at night, and then she is so knocked up that she cannot do aught when she gets home, so I have to do everything for her what I can, for I have no work, nor had any for more nor three years, and I shall never have any more work while I live;” and then he wept a big tear.  Jack again said:  “There is work enough for women folks and childer hereabouts, but none for men; thou mayest sooner find a hundred pound on the road than work for men—­but I should never have believed that either thou or any one else would have seen me mending my wife’s stockings, for, it is bad work.  But she can hardly stand on her feet; I am afraid she will be laid up, and then I don’t know what is to become of us, for it’s a good bit that she has been the man in the house and I the woman; it is bad work, Joe;” and he cried bitterly, and said, “It has not been always so.”  “No,” said Joe; “but when thou hadn’t no work, how hast thou not shifted?” “I’ll tell thee, Joe, as well as I can, but it was bad enough; thou knowest when I got married I had work plenty, and thou knows I was not lazy.”  “No, that thou wert not.”  “And we had a good furnished house, and Mary need not go to work.  I could work for the two of us; but now the world is upside down.  Mary has to work and I have to stop at home, mind the childer sweep and wash, bake and mend; and, when the poor woman comes home at night, she is knocked up.  Thou knows, Joe, it’s hard for one that was used different.”  “Yes, boy, it is hard.”  And then Jack began to cry again, and he wished he had never married, and that he had never been born; but he had never thought, when he wed Mary, that it would come to this.  “I have often cried over it,” said Jack.  Now when Joe heard this, he told me that he had cursed and damned the factories, and the masters, and the Government, with all the curses that he had learned while he was in the factory from a child.