“No, nor me!” cried the third. “I likes London. I can stand on my head twice as long as Tommy Blake, an’ he’s a year older’n me.”

“Hold yer tongues, you rascals, an’ go to sleep,” growled the father, pretending to be angry with them. “What right have you to be awake at this time o’ the night—an’ in Lon’on too? It’s not like the country, you know. In the country you can do much as you like, but not in the town! You’ve no call to be awake listenin’ to what yer father an’ mother was sayin’ to theirselves.”

“We wasn’t listenin’, father. We was only hearin’ ‘cause we wasn’t asleep. An’ you didn’t speak down as if it was secrets.”

“Well, you know there’s things as fathers and mothers can understand an’ talk about as no boys can see to the end. So they better go to sleep and wait till their turn comes to be fathers and mothers theirselves. Go to sleep direc’ly, or I’ll break every bone in your bodies!”

“Yes, father,” they answered together, in no way terrified by the awful threat—which was not a little weakened by the fact that they had heard it every day of their lives and not yet known it to be carried out.

But having become aware that his children were awake, the father, without the least hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, changed his tone: in the presence of his children he preferred looking at the other side of the argument. After a few moments’ silence he began again.

“Yes, as you was sayin’, wife, an’ I knows as yer always in the right, if the right be anyhows to be got at—there’s no sayin’ when that same as we was speakin’ of—the Almighty is the man I mean—no sayin’, I say, when he may come to see as we have, as I may say, had enough o’ it, an’ turn an’ let us have a taste o’ luck again.”

“So it do seem to me, John,” answered the mother.

“Well,” said Franks, apparently, now that he had taken up the defense of the ways of the Supreme with men, warming to his subject, “I daresay he do the best he can, an’ give us as much luck as is good for us. Leastways that’s how the rest of us would do. We can’t always do as well as we would like for to do for our little ones, but we always do the best we can. We’ll suppose yet a little while, anyhow, as how he’s a lookin’ after us. It can’t be for nothin’, as he counts the hairs on our head, as the sayin’ is!”