famous verses, “Ou sont les neiges d’antan?” were as familiar to her as Herrick’s “Come, my Corinna, let us go a-maying.”  But, on the whole, she was strangely and poorly equipped for the battle of life.  Her knowledge of baking, brewing, and general housewifery would have stood her in good stead on some Colonial settlement,—­but she had scarcely heard of these far-away refuges for the destitute, as she so seldom read the newspapers.  Old Hugo Jocelyn looked upon the cheap daily press as “the curse of the country,” and never willingly allowed a newspaper to come into the living-rooms of Briar Farm.  They were relegated entirely to the kitchen and outhouses, where the farm labourers smoked over them and discussed them to their hearts’ content, seldom venturing, however, to bring any item of so-called “news” to their master’s consideration.  If they ever chanced to do so, he would generally turn round upon them with a few cutting observations, such as,—­

“How do you know it’s true?  Who gives the news?  Where’s the authority?  And what do I care if some human brute has murdered his wife and blown out his own brains?  Am I going to be any the better for reading such a tale?  And if one Government is in or t’other out, what does it matter to me, or to any of you, so long as you can work and pay your way?  The newspapers are always trying to persuade us to meddle in other folks’s business;—­I say, take care of your own affairs!—­serve God and obey the laws of the country, and there won’t be much going wrong with you!  If you must read, read a decent book—­something that will last—­not a printed sheet full of advertisements that’s fresh one day and torn up for waste paper the next!”

Under the sway of these prejudiced and arbitrary opinions, it was not possible for Innocent to have much knowledge of the world that lay outside Briar Farm.  Sometimes she found Priscilla reading an old magazine or looking at a picture-paper, and she would borrow these and take them up to her own room surreptitiously for an hour or so, but she was always more or less pained and puzzled by their contents.  It seemed to her that there were an extraordinary number of pictures of women with scarcely any clothes on, and she could not understand how they managed to be pictured at all in such scanty attire.

“Who are they?” she asked of Priscilla on one occasion—­“And how is it that they are photographed like this?  It must be so shameful for them!”

Priscilla explained as best she could that they were “dancers and the like.”

“They lives by their legs, lovey!” she said soothingly—­“It’s only their legs that gits them their bread and butter, and I s’pose they’re bound to show ’em off.  Don’t you worry ’ow they gits done!  You’ll never come across any of ’em!”

Innocent shut her sensitive mouth in a firm, proud line.

“I hope not!” she said.