o'clock at night, to earn eighteen-pence._ His wages averaged only about
_seven shillings a week_; and there were five of them in the family to
live on what they could earn. It was hard to make up the loss of an
hour. Not one of their hands, however little, could be spared. Jemmy was
going on nine years of age, and a helpful lad he was; and the poor man
looked at him doatingly. Jemmy could work off a thousand nails a day, of
the smallest size. The rent of their little shop, tenement and garden,
was five pounds a year; and a few pennies earned by the youngest of them
were of great account.

But, continued the blacksmith, speaking cheerily, I am not the one that
ought to complain. Many is the man that has a harder lot of it than I,
among the nailers along this hill and in the valley. My neighbor in the
next door could tell you something about labor you never have heard the
like of in your country. He is an older man than I, and there are seven
of them in his family; and, for all that, he has no boy like Jemmy here
to help him. Some of his little girls are sickly, and their mother is
not over strong, and it all comes on him. He is an oldish man, as I was
saying, yet he not only works eighteen hours every day at his forge, but
_every Friday in the year he works all night long_, and never lays off
his clothes till late of Saturday night. A good neighbor is John
Stubbins, and the only man just in our neighborhood who can read the
newspaper. It is not often he gets a newspaper; for it is not the like
of us that can have newspapers and bread too at the same time in our
houses. But now and then he begs an old one, partly torn, at the
baker's, and reads it to us of a Sunday night. So once in two or three
weeks, we hear something of what is going on in the world--something
about Corn Laws, and the Duke of Wellington, and Oregon, and India, and
Ireland, and other parts of England. We heard tell a while ago that the
poor people would not have to make so many nails for a loaf of bread