CHATS WITH ANCIENT FOLK off, and his tongue was sore for weeks afterwards; he could see no pleasure in smoking. When he was a young man he used generally to walk to Lincoln and back on Sundays, a distance of twenty-nine miles, besides doing his regular work as a farm-labourer on week-days, for which he was paid the exorbitant wage of from 7s. to 9s. a week, out of which he actually managed to pay rent for a cottage and brought up a family of twelve children. "My hours of toil were from six o'clock in the morning till six o'clock in the evening, and I had to start from my home at five and got back at seven." We thought the expression "my hours of toil" much to the point; but he did not appear to consider that his life had been a particularly hard one, indeed he remarked that he could not understand the present generation—"they can neither work nor walk," and he praised God that he could still work!
Then we visited a Mrs. Sarah Watson, who said she was born in 1805. When she was a girl she saw a man hanging on a gibbet at Harby in Lincolnshire, which stood on the spot where he committed a murder. She used to go out to the gibbet with friends to watch which of the murderer's bones would fall off next! "Ah! them were the good old days," she exclaimed, "life were exciting then. Now I cannot walk; but I'm fond of reading. I've read the Bible through from the first page to the last, all save the hard names, and I've begun it afresh but have not got through it again yet. I've read Pilgrims Progress; that is an interesting book, I did enjoy it." There was some-
