In their daily life they had none of the conveniences now looked upon as necessities: no water nearer than the communal well, no sanitation beyond the garden closet, and no light but candles and paraffin lamps. It was a hard life, but the hamlet folks did not pity themselves. They kept their pity for those they thought really poor.

The children brought home from the Sunday School Lending Library books about the London slums which their mothers also read. This was then a favourite subject with writers of that class of fiction; their object apparently being not so much to arouse indignation at the terrible conditions as to provide a striking background for some ministering lady or child. Many tears were shed in the hamlet over Christie’s Old Organ and Froggy’s Little Brother, and everybody wished they could have brought those poor neglected slum children there and shared with them the best they had of everything. “Poor little mite. If we could have got him here, he could have slept with our young Sammy and this air’d have set him up in no time,” one woman said of Froggy’s poor dying little brother, forgetting that he was, as she would have said at another time, “just somebody in a book.”

But, saddening as it was to read about the poor things, it was also enjoyable, for it gave one a cheering sense of superiority. Thank God, the reader had a whole house to herself with an upstairs and downstairs and did not have to “pig it” in one room; and real beds, and clean ones, not bundles of rags in corners, to sleep on.

To them, as to the two children learning to live among them, the hamlet life was the normal life. On one side of that norm were the real poor, living in slums, and, on the other, “the gentry.” They recognized no other division of classes; although, of course, they knew there were a few “better most people” between. The visiting clergyman and that kind friend of them all, the doctor in the market town, had more money and better houses than theirs, and though they were both “gentlemen born” they did not belong to the aristocracy inhabiting the great country houses or visiting the hunting boxes around. But these were, indulgently, “th’ ole parson,” and, affectionately, “our doctor;” they were not thought of as belonging to any particular class of society.