the cottage, because another man must have it; the years during which she worked her way while the ten were growing up, having measles, and chicken pox, and scarlet fever, one dying here and there, dropping out quite in the natural order of things, and being buried by the parish in corners of the ancient church yard.  Three of them “was took” by scarlet fever, then one of a “decline,” then one or two by other illnesses.  Only four reached man and womanhood.  One had gone to Australia, but he never was one to write, and after a year or two, Betty gathered, he had seemed to melt away into the great distance.  Two girls had married, and Mrs. Welden could not say they had been “comf’able.”  They could barely feed themselves and their swarms of children.  The other son had never been steady like his father.  He had at last gone to London, and London had swallowed him up.  Betty was struck by the fact that she did not seem to feel that the mother of ten might have expected some return for her labours, at eighty-three.

Her unresentful acceptance of things was at once significant and moving.  Betty found her amazing.  What she lived on it was not easy to understand.  She seemed rather like a cheerful old bird, getting up each unprovided-for morning, and picking up her sustenance where she found it.

“There’s more in the sayin’ ‘the Lord pervides’ than a good many thinks,” she said with a small chuckle, marked more by a genial and comfortable sense of humour than by an air of meritoriously quoting the vicar.  “He do.”

She paid one and threepence a week in rent for her cottage, and this was the most serious drain upon her resources.  She apparently could live without food or fire, but the rent must be paid.  “An’ I do get a bit be’ind sometimes,” she confessed apologetically, “an’ then it’s a trouble to get straight.”

Her cottage was one of a short row, and she did odd jobs for the women who were her neighbours.  There were always babies to be looked after, and “bits of ’elp” needed, sometimes there were “movings” from one cottage to another, and “confinements” were plainly at once exhilarating and enriching.  Her temperamental good cheer, combined with her experience, made her a desirable companion and assistant.  She was engagingly frank.

“When they’re new to it, an’ a bit frightened, I just give ’em a cup of ‘ot tea, an’ joke with ’em to cheer ’em up,” she said.  “I says to Charles Jenkins’ wife, as lives next door, ’come now, me girl, it’s been goin’ on since Adam an’ Eve, an’ there’s a good many of us left, isn’t there?’ An’ a fine boy it was, too, miss, an’ ‘er up an’ about before ’er month.”

She was paid in sixpences and spare shillings, and in cups of tea, or a fresh-baked loaf, or screws of sugar, or even in a garment not yet worn beyond repair.  And she was free to run in and out, and grow a flower or so in her garden, and talk with a neighbour over the low dividing hedge.