AN UMBRELLA MAN 191 



well. Polly she looked whiter than ever and afraid; 

 I suppose I was a bit rough and dirty and sunburnt, for 

 'twas a hot harvest and 'twas the end of the second week 

 of it, and I was that fierce I felt I ought to have had my 

 way. . . . All that night I thought I had done a wrong 

 thing trying to keep her from dying that way, and I tell 

 you I cried in case I had done any harm by it. . . . That 

 very night she died without our knowing it. She was a 

 bonny maid, that fond of flowers. The night she was 

 taken ill she was 'coming home with me from the Thirteen 

 Acre, where I'd been hoeing the mangolds, and she had 

 picked a rose for her mother. All of a sudden she looks 

 at it and says, c It's gone, it's broke, it's gone, it's gone, 

 gone, gone,' and she kept on, ' It's broke, it's gone, it's 

 gone,' and when she got home she ran up to her mother, 

 crying, ' The wild rose is broke, mother; broke, gone, 

 gone,' she says, just like that," said the old man, in a 

 high finical voice more like that of a bird than a child. . . . 

 " Then my old woman well, she was only a bit of 

 a wench too; seventeen when we were married she 

 took ill and died within a week after. . . . There was a 

 purpose in it. ... It was then the end of harvest. I 

 spent all my wages down at the Fighting Cocks, and 

 then I set out to walk to Mildenhall in Wiltshire, where 

 my wife came from. On the way I met a chap I had 

 quarrelled with in Egypt, and he says to me, ' Hullo, 

 Scrammy-handed Jack,' with a sort of look, and I, not 

 thinking what I did, I set about him, and before I knew it 

 he was lying there as might be dead, and I went and gave 

 myself up, and I don't mind saying that I wished I might 

 be hanged for it. However, I did six months. That was 

 how I came to be in the umbrella line. I took up with 



