It might be supposed from the foregoing dialogue that Daddy Darwin was a
model householder, and the little workhouse boy the neatest creature
breathing. But the gentle reader who may imagine this is much mistaken.

Daddy Darwin's Dovecot was freehold, and when he inherited it from his
father there was, still attached to it a good bit of the land that had
passed from father to son through more generations than the church
registers were old enough to record. But the few remaining acres were so
heavily mortgaged that they had to be sold. So that a bit of house
property elsewhere, and the old homestead itself, were all that was
left. And Daddy Darwin had never been the sort of man to retrieve his
luck at home, or to seek it abroad.

That he had inherited a somewhat higher and more refined nature than his
neighbors had rather hindered than helped him to prosper. And he had
been unlucky in love. When what energies he had were in their prime, his
father's death left him with such poor prospects that the old farmer to
whose daughter he was betrothed broke off the match and married her
elsewhere. His Alice was not long another man's wife. She died within a
year from her wedding-day, and her husband married again within a year
from her death. Her old lover was no better able to mend his broken
heart than his broken fortunes. He only banished women from the Dovecot,
and shut himself up from the coarse consolation of his neighbors.

In this loneliness, eating a kindly heart out in bitterness of spirit,
with all that he ought to have had--

To plough and sow
And reap and mow--