contrived to keep the mill running, shine or shower. Times must be parlous bad indeed if the great water-wheel did not turn at proper times in the race at Wilberlee; and constant employment is more to a man than high wages, with slack times in between, if men had only the sense to see it.

It is not necessary to go far back into the ancestry of the Tinkers, though, in a quiet way, they were not a little proud of it. Old William Tinker had left two sons, both of whom had been brought up to the business, and to both, as partners, the business had been left. Jabez, the elder, I shall have much to say. Richard, the younger, might not have been a Tinker at all. He did not “favour” the Tinkers, who were traditionally tall lean, wiry, big-boned men, somewhat sallow of complexion, with dark straight hair, scant of speech, inflexible of will, their word their law, neither grasping nor prodigal, and as strict at chapel as the counting-house. But Dick Tinker, Dick o’ Will’s o’th Wilberlee, had been a “non-such.” He had blue eyes that always sparkled with mirth; curling chestnut hair, that affronted Puritanic sense; and he was a sad spendthrift. He had a hearty word for everyone. He liked to go of a night to the Rose and Crown, and led the revels there. He never missed a meet of the harriers, and he kept his own game-cock. He had a very appreciative eye for a pretty face, even though it was half-hid under a weaver’s shawl, and for a neat ankle, though cased in clogs. During his widowed father’s life he had gone dutifully to chapel, when he couldn’t make any plausible excuse for shirking attendance, for it was no small matter to stand up against the old man’s will. But when the father died, Dick stoutly declared, with not a few oaths, that he was sick to death of the Hard-bedders—such was his irreverent term for the Particular, very particular, Baptists—and contented himself by going to the Parish Church, on those rare occasions when he felt need of spiritual solace. Then he capped all his follies by marrying the pretty, penniless, governess at the Vicarage, a girl said to be from down Lincolnshire way, who spoke with refined accent, had gentle, graceful ways, and was so clearly a lady that every woman in the district, save the Vicar’s wife and the working folk, resented it. But the moors were too bleak for her and she had the grace to die after two years—which had been like Paradise to Dick—leaving him an infant daughter, Dorothy.

Jabez had not liked his brother’s marriage. He had nothing to say against his sister-in-law, except that it would have been better if she had been a “that country’s” woman. Why couldn’t Dick have done as the Tinker’s had done from 

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