None of the listeners cast doubt upon the value of such treasures. It would not have been “manners,” and, besides, nearly everybody had got some article with a similar legend. At home, the children’s father laughed and said that as none of the Braby family had ever had more than twenty shillings at one time in their lives an offer of twenty pounds would soon have been snapped at; and as to Mrs. Gaskin’s rubies and emeralds, anybody with half an eye could see that they came from the same mine as the stuff used to make penny tumblers.

“What’s the odds, if thinking so makes them happy?” asked his wife.

They were a hardworking, self-reliant, passably honest people. “Providence helps them as has got the sense to look out for theirselves” was a motto often quoted. They had not much original wit, but had inherited a stock of cheerful sayings which passed as such. A neighbour called in to help move a heavy piece of furniture would arrive spitting on his palms and saying, “Here I be, ready an’ willin’ to do as much for half a crown as I ‘ud for a shillin’.” Which mild joke, besides the jumbled arithmetic, had the added point of the fantastic sum suggested as a reward. A glass of beer, or the price of one, was the current payment for that and some more considerable services.

One who had helped a neighbour to solve some knotty problem would quote the old proverb: “Two heads be better n’r one,” and the other would retort, “That’s why fools get married,” or, if materially minded, “Aye, specially if ‘um be sheep’s heads.” A proverb always had to be capped. No one could say, “There’s more ways of killing a dog than hanging it” without being reminded, “nor of choking it with a pound of fresh butter,” and any reference to money as the root of all evil would be followed by, “Same time, I ‘udn’t say no to anybody as offered me a slip off that root.”

The discussion of their own and their neighbours’ affairs took the place occupied by books and films in the modern outlook. Nothing of outside importance ever happened there and their lives were as unlike as possible the modern conception of country life, for Lark Rise was neither a little hotbed of vice nor a garden of all the Arcadian virtues. But the lives of all human beings, however narrow, have room for complications for themselves and entertainment for the onlooker, and many a satisfying little drama was played out on that ten-foot stage.