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"I don't see how we can help ourselves save by sending the maids out to service. But don't you fret, lovey-duck. We can do no more than our best for them, and if they can't get placed without grand gowns and shifts, then they'll have to stop as they are, I reckon. But I mean to try."

He tried, and Ruth tried too. With a neighbour's help she made the little girls a new gown each, and three shifts. The neighbour, Mrs. Cheale, had recently lost a daughter in a decline, and these were her clothes, washed and cut up for Susan and Tamar. There was some stuff over to hem into two large handkerchiefs, in which their wardrobes were bestowed and carried to East Grinstead, where their father meant to dispose of them at the hiring.

There were two hiring fairs a year, one on Lady Day and one on Michaelmas Day, which in those parts was kept on October the eleventh. The market-place at East Grinstead would be full of men and maids waiting to be hired. You could get a stout maid of all work for six pounds a year, a chicken girl for seven, an outdoor girl for five. The men were paid weekly, from eight to twelve shillings, and expected, besides, their lodging in their master's house, or, if married, a cottage with fuel, milk, and sometimes flour. But year by year their demands grew less, as hunger pressed down on the 'forties. The market would be crowded, as it was this day, with little boys and girls, whose parents had come to regard them merely as so many extra bellies.