round my knees. And you ask me why I do not go abroad to seek for new
labours! Godsooth! Would you have me to leave my household to starve in
summer and die of cold in winter, and my children to go untrained, while I
gad about to seek for other work? A man must have his belly full and his
back covered before all things in life. Who, think you, would spin and
bake and brew, and rear and train my babes, if I went abroad? New labour,
indeed, when the days are not long enough, and I have to toil far into the
night! I have no time to talk with fools! Who will rear and shape the
nation if I do not?"

And the young maiden at the cottage door, beside her wheel, asked why she
was content and did not seek new fields of labour, would surely have
answered: "Go away, I have no time to listen to you. Do you not see that
I am spinning here that I too may have a home of my own? I am weaving the
linen garments that shall clothe my household in the long years to come! I
cannot marry till the chest upstairs be full. You cannot hear it, but as I
sit here alone, spinning, far off across the hum of my spinning-wheel I
hear the voices of my little unborn children calling to me--'O mother,
mother, make haste, that we may be!'--and sometimes, when I seem to be
looking out across my wheel into the sunshine, it is the blaze of my own
fireside that I see, and the light shines on the faces round it; and I spin
on the faster and the steadier when I think of what shall come. Do you ask
me why I do not go out and labour in the fields with the lad whom I have
chosen? Is his work, then, indeed more needed than mine for the raising of
that home that shall be ours? Oh, very hard I will labour, for him and for
my children, in the long years to come. But I cannot stop to talk to you
now. Far off, over the hum of my spinning-wheel, I hear the voices of my
children calling, and I must hurry on. Do you ask me why I do not seek for
labour whose hands are full to bursting? Who will give folk to the nation
if I do not?"