'
'Come along, Dennis, we shall be late,' said Marshall, and the two
forthwith took their departure in order to attend another meeting.
'Much either of 'em knows about it,' said Mrs Caffyn when they had
gone. 'There's Marshall getting two pounds a week reg'lar, and goes
on talking about people at Leicester, and he has never been in
Leicester in his life; and, as for that Dennis, he knows less than
Marshall, for he does nothing but write for newspapers and draw for
picture-books, never nothing what you may call work, and he does
worrit me so whenever he begins about poor people that I can't sit
still. _I_ do know what the poor is, having lived at Great Oakhurst
all these years.'
'You are not a Chartist, then?' said Baruch.
'Me--me a Chartist? No, I ain't, and yet, maybe, I'm something
worse. What would be the use of giving them poor creatures votes?
Why, there isn't one of them as wouldn't hold up his hand for anybody
as would give him a shilling. Quite right of 'em, too, for the one
thing they have to think about from morning to night is how to get a
bit of something to fill their bellies, and they won't fill them by
voting.'
'But what would you do for them?'
'Ah! that beats me! Hang somebody, but I don't know who it ought to
be. There's a family by the name of Longwood, they live just on the
slope of the hill nigh the Dower Farm, and there's nine of them, and
the youngest when I left was a baby six months old, and their living-
room faces the road so that the north wind blows in right under the
door, and I've seen the snow lie in heaps inside.
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