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"Three liddle women, and two of them ladies, how am I to bring them up?"

Then when Aaron came, and she and her husband were proud and glad because a man was born into the world, she said:

"We'll have the lad taught his book, and the girl children shall work for us."

And when the twins came she said:

"We can't afford to keep so many idle mouths. The girls must go into the fields."

So the three idle mouths, aged respectively five, four and three, went out to earn between them eighteen pence a week. Tamar and Ruth were taken on at Pickdick, to weed and scare, and fetch and carry for the chicken girl. Susan, being older, went to a remoter farm known as Beggars Bush, to which she toddled on her slow fat legs alone every day at morning-light. She was given her dinner to take with her, the usual flour dumpling tied up in a handkerchief, because the fields where she worked were often too far from the farm-house for her to be fed at the master's table. She would be given a rattle, with which she would squat amidst the grain, suddenly starting up to shake it at the predatory birds; or she would be given a basket, which she must fill with stones, or a sack to fill with weeds. There were often other children with her, or women, stooping along the furrows; but when she scared birds she was quite alone.