BREAD AND TOBACCO. 273 



Our guide was a man of about forty, having a wife and seven 

 children ; neither he nor any of his family (he thought) could 

 read or write, and, except with regard to his occupation as agri- 

 cultural laborer, I scarcely ever saw a man of so limited informa- 

 tion. He could tell us, for instance, almost no more about the 

 church which adjoined his residence than if he had never seen it 

 not half so much as we could discover for ourselves by a single 

 glance at it. He had nothing to say about the clergyman who 

 officiated in it, and could tell us nothing about the parish, except 

 its name, and that it allowed him and five other laborers to 

 occupy the "almshouse" we had seen, rent free. He couldn't 

 say how old he was (he appeared about forty) ; but he could say, 

 " like a book," that God was what made the world, and that 

 " Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom he 

 was chief" of the truth of which latter clause I much doubted, 

 suspecting the arch fiend would rank higher, among his servants, 

 the man whose idea of duty and impulse of love had been satis- 

 fied with cramming this poor soul with such shells of spiritual 

 nourishment. He thought two of his children knew the cate- 

 chism and the creed ; did not think they could have learned it 

 from a book ; they might, but he never heard them read ; when 

 he came home and had gotten his supper, he had a smoke and 

 then went to bed. His wages were seven shillings sometimes 

 had been eight a-week. None of his children earned any thing ; 

 his wife, it might be, did somewhat in harvest-time. But take 

 the year through, one dollar and sixty-eight cents a-week was all 

 they earned to support themselves and their large family. How 

 could they live ? " Why, indeed, it was hard," he said ; " some- 

 times, if we'd believe him, it had been as much as he could do 

 to keep himself in tobacco ! " He mentioned this as if it was a 

 vastly more memorable hardship than that, oft-times, he could get 

 nothing more than dry bread for his family to eat. It was a 

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