pence. Enough for us if it be honestly obtained.
Of the terrible pressure from without which
brought it down to this lower level, we neither
think nor ask.

A tragedy lies in that well-made, substantial,
but somewhat old-fashioned coat of fine
broadcloth, a trifle worn about the seams and
elbows, but in excellent preservation yet, and
worth, even in its decadence, more than the
newest and most fashionably-cut paletot of
sham and shoddy to be met with. A good,
plain, substantial, and thoroughly respectable
coat; a coat that tells its own history of the
paternal acres so long held intact in the family;
of the solid English worth and stainless English
name which have been sowed and reaped
for all these generations, and which now have
come to the hammer like the slightest thing of
yesterday bought only for its hour of shine and
glitter. We can easily picture all that has
brought this coat of honest broadcloth to the
ragman's shop – to the companionship of stage-
spangles and the soiled ball-dresses of feather-
headed girls, not careful of playing with fire;
we can run through the causes, one by one,
that broke the ploughshare short off the yoke
before the sowing-time was done, so that the
corn grew up choked with weeds and couch-
grass, and strewn with flaring poppies, fiery red
for shame of flaunting where the children's
bread should have been. Bad companions; the
facile weakness that cannot say No, and that
consents to iniquity because too soft-tempered
to resist; the fatal love for what was unworthy
– a love that grew like flaring poppies among
the corn, and took up the place of the quieter
and nobler growths, yet an honest love, too,
in the man's heart, and therefore of more
pernicious influence; the large-handedness,
traditional to the race, widening into lavishness,
and lavishness degenerating into extravagance,
and extravagance losing itself in the black peat-
bog of ruin – yes, we can read off all its history
in the worn seams and elbows of that stout old-
fashioned coat of finest broadcloth, lying now
in the old-clothes shop to be bought and worn
by burglar, thief, or sharper, at pleasure. And
there, down in the rich heart of Kent, lie the
broken ploughshare and the rusty harrow –
there the mother sits by the darkened casement,
looking over the fair fields that were once hers,
and that are now a stranger's; there, in the
quiet churchyard, sleeps the brave old father
whose heart would have broken if he had lived
to see this day; while, on his tombstone for a
resting-place, sits the fair-faced ruin who has
helped his son to his fall. Scarlet poppies are
in her hand, and her eyes are blue as that blue
scabious at her feet, her golden hair hangs down
in tendrils like the curling stems of the climbing
vetches which have overrun the corn-fields, and
she sits on the old man's gravestone and laughs
to her companion, and lures him, too, on to his
destruction, as she has lured on others, and will
again. But that companion is not the son of
the old yeoman. She has done with him; ever
since she wrung the last shilling from him, got
by the sale of his father's broadcloth coat to the
old-clothesman in Houndsditch.

Another sad tale is told in those motheaten
blankets; large, soft, warm – fit for a royal bed
when they were new, and would be still, had
they been properly cared for. But they
belonged to the household of a careless woman;
a woman who scouted homely work and ways –
who sat with her feet on the fender and read
novels, while her children sprawled on the
ground untended, and her household went to
pieces for want of the sustaining hand to knit it
together. She started with a fair wind and all
sails set, when she put out into the great sea of
life and loving marriage: but she brought her
ship before long to shameful wreck by her
carelessness and indolence, and the evil piloting of
neglect. She let the moth eat into her blankets,
and the rust eat into her steel, and the damp
mildew her silk and linen, and the mice devour
her cheese and bacon; till her husband one day
saw himself gazetted as a bankrupt, because his
wife liked to read novels better than to keep
house, and preferred the heroisms of romance
to the nobleness of reality. There are more
motheaten blankets in middle-class houses than
one would like to contemplate, if one but knew
the secrets of store-closets: the homely duty of
careful housekeeping having fallen into
disfavour of late among the tribe of fine ladies.

Here, too, are baskets of second-hand baby-
clothes – layettes, as our neighbours call them
– the bows and ends of white ribbons gone
long ago, and the bright pink flannel washed
into a melancholy salmon- colour, as unlike
the radiancy of its first freshness as the hoary
sinner is unlike the innocent boy. Perhaps
that basket of baby-clothes has done duty for
a long succession of little strangers; so no
wonder if all the finery has disappeared, if the
bows and tags of white satin ribbon have been
cut off, if the worked frills and flounces have
more rents than broideries in them. For the first,
mamma thought it no hardship to strip her yet
young marriage clothes of half their prettiness,
that she might make baby look the child of a
prince at least. Older mothers smiled in their
hearts when they saw mamma snipping off her
fineries; they knew to what a peaceful state of
languid indifference in the matter of ribbons
and laces she would come by the time the sixth
or even the fifth had to be provided for; and
how a lopsided strip of old grey-bearded
Saxony, if only serviceable to its purpose, would
be quite as acceptable in her eyes as the
exactest parallelogram of delicate rose-colour
bound with inch-wide ribbon exquisitely worked.
At present, it is all the difference between the
new and the old, the strange and the well-
used, the instinct just awakened, and all blushing
in its emotion, and the instinct become quite
comely and matronly, and taking to its duties in a
matter-of-fact kind of way, solicitous only for the
expedient and the actual necessity. Motherhood
and baby-clothes are not the only things in this
life that lose their sharpness by yearly wear!

Near to these baskets holding the wardrobes