When my father was gone I succeeded him
as Mr. Wyham's shepherd, and shortly
afterwards Mary and I were married. We lived
in the same cottage with her father, and the
memory of the four succeeding years seems
flooded in a light from Heaven. My wages
were not such as to enable us to do much,
but with care I was generally able to put by
something every Saturday, to be laid up in
store against our old age in the Louth
Savings Bank.

In four years we had a boy and two girls,
the latter stout, rosy little cherubs enough,
but the boy, the eldest, was sickly from his
birth, and at the end of his third year, just as
we began to think we should rear him, he
was taken from us. It was a sad blow, the
first we had sustained, and the beginning of
our troubles.

Soon after that Mr. Wyham died, and his
son took the management of the farm. The
old man had been a good master to me and
my father before me, though rather harsh and
proud in his manner. His son was capricious,
tyrannical, and a spendthrift. His extravagance
often put him to shifts for money,
which he tried to raise by grinding his
labourers. He raised the rent of our cottage,
and tried to lower my wages; but I threatened
to leave him, and he knew what I was
worth too well to allow it to come to that.
For I was worth a great deal to him; he was
not so good a farmer as his father, and I
might have neglected my business, or even
cheated him downright when I sold his sheep
at the markets for him, without his being any
the wiser. But though he did not lower my
wages, there are a thousand little suspicious
ways of making a man's work unpleasant to
him, and of these he was a master. I should
certainly have left his service had it not been
for the memory of his father, and the yearning
I felt towards the cottage, the fields, the old
mill, everything belonging to the place where
I had lived all my life. Every tree, every
hedge was fraught with some association. No,
I could not have torn myself away!

One day in harvest-time, while I was with
my sheep, Mr. Wyham came and asked me to
go and help to get in the wheat. It was not
my business, but he was short of labourers,
and the glass was falling, he said, and he
feared there would be rain in a day or two.
I agreed with him, and went willingly to the
harvest-field, where I exerted myself to the
utmost, being really anxious lest the fine
weather should not hold out till the wheat
was fairly housed; for if the rich cared as
much for the interests of the poor as the poor
often do for theirs, England would he a far
happier country. I worked all day at "picking"
the sheaves up to the waggon, until, from
the great heat, and the being unaccustomed
to that kind of work, I was almost exhausted.

One of the men suggested that I should
take his place on the waggon to receive and
arrange the sheaves—which is a lighter task;
so giving him my fork I got up. The change
of employment was a relief, and the waggon
was soon piled up with sheaves to a great
height, when I felt a sudden faintness, my
foot slipped, and I fell to the ground, my side
striking one of the shafts of the waggon in
the fall; I was carried home and laid senseless
on a bed, from which I could not rise for
four months. I had sustained a severe
internal injury, which made it doubtful whether
I should ever be able to work again; and, oh,
the agony of body and mind I suffered as I
lay helpless on that bed! for what was to
become of Mary and the children! It was
true, Mr. Wyham spoke as I had never heard
him before, saying that I had received the
injury in his service, and he would not forget
it. I believed him sincere at the time, but
knew the fickleness of his temper too well to
place much reliance on his promises.

I got over that long illness better than the
doctor expected, and was able to go about
my work again six months after the accident.
But I was not the same man that I had been
before; whenever I exerted my strength to any
great degree, such as in lifting heavy weights,
or walking to any very distant market, I felt
a sort of sinking in my side, and a faintness
would come over me. Still I managed to do
my work; and had that been all, might still
have been as happy as a poor man can expect
to be; but sickness seemed to have seized
on the family. First, Mary's father died.
Then, poor Mary herself fell into a very bad
state of health. She never complained, and
bore up wonderfully, but any one could see
how she altered from month to month;
indeed, we both grew old so rapidly, that
when I was forty-five and she forty-three,
people used to think us past sixty. Our girls
grew up and went out to service, and parting
with them was another sad trial to Mary,
for they were her only companions during
the long days while I was in the fields.

We went on, working and laying by, till
I had reached my fiftieth year. Every day
I felt more and more unfitted for work, and
I began to think seriously of drawing our
savings, now amounting to fifty pounds, from
the bank, and settling in some small shop in
the village about four miles off. There was
a capital opportunity for doing this just then,
for Dame Harland, who had kept the general
shop there for the last ten years, was just
dead, and her son wished to sell the goods
and custom for forty pounds. Mary and
I talked the matter over, until at last
we agreed upon it; so I closed with
Harland, and gave Mr. Wyham notice to look
out for another shepherd. He tried all he
could to dissuade me from my purpose, for
there were no signs of my failing powers in
the way my work was done. But I had
made up my mind, and the only thing
remaining to be done was to draw the money
from the Savings Bank, hand it over to
Harland, and take possession of the cottage.