Laura’s father, as well as his Weekly Despatch, took the Carpenter and Builder, through which the children got their first introduction to Shakespeare, for there was a controversy in it as to Hamlet’s words, “I know a hawk from a handsaw.” It appeared that some scholar had suggested that it should read, “I know a hawk from a heron, pshaw!” and the carpenters and builders were up in arms. Of course, the hawk was the mason’s and plasterer’s tool of that name, and the handsaw was just a handsaw. Although that line and a few extracts that she afterwards found in the school readers were all that Laura was to know of Shakespeare’s works for some time, she sided warmly with the carpenters and builders, and her mother, when appealed to, agreed, for she said “that heron, pshaw!” certainly sounded a bit left-handed.

While the novelette readers, who represented the genteel section of the community, were enjoying their tea, there would be livelier gatherings at another of the cottages. The hostess, Caroline Arless, was at that time about forty-five, and a tall, fine, upstanding woman with flashing dark eyes, hair like crinkled black wire, and cheeks the colour of a ripe apricot. She was not a native of the hamlet, but had come there as a bride, and it was said that she had gipsy blood in her.

Although she was herself a grandmother, she still produced a child of her own every eighteen months or so, a proceeding regarded as bad form in the hamlet, for the saying ran, “When the young ‘uns begin, ‘tie time for the old ‘uns to finish.” But Mrs. Arless recognized no rules, excepting those of Nature. She welcomed each new arrival, cared for it tenderly while it was helpless, swept it out of doors to play as soon as it could toddle, to school at three, and to work at ten or eleven. Some of the girls married at seventeen and the boys at nineteen or twenty.