into lengths of about six inches, leaving, if he could, a notch at the bottom of each piece. He always had a beautifully sharp knife that could cut a straw clean without hurting it. Then he set in the middle of the table a heap of gunpowder, a little pile of black grains upon the white-scrubbed board. He made and trimmed the straws while Paul and Annie filled and plugged them. Paul loved to see the black grains trickle down a crack in his palm into the mouth of the straw, peppering jollily downwards till the straw was full. Then he bungled up the mouth with a bit of soap—which he got on his thumb nail from a pat in a saucer—and the straw was finished.
“Look, dad!” he said.
“That’s right, my beauty,” replied Morel, who was peculiarly lavish of endearments to his second son. Paul popped the fuse into the powder-tin, ready for the morning, when Morel would take it to the pit, and use it to fire a shot that would blast the coal down.
Meantime Arthur, still fond of his father, would lean on the arm of Morel’s chair, and say:
“Tell us about down pit, daddy.”
This Morel loved to do.
“Well, there’s one little ’oss—we call ’im Taffy,” he would begin. “An’ he’s a fawce un!”
Morel had a warm way of telling a story. He made one feel Taffy’s cunning.
“He’s a brown un,” he would answer, “an’ not very high. Well, he comes i’ th’ stall wi’ a rattle, an’ then yo’ ’ear ’im sneeze.
“ ‘Ello, Taff,’ you say, ‘what art sneezin’ for? Bin ta’ein’ some snuff?’
“An’ ’e sneezes again. Then he slives up an’ shoves ’is ’ead on yer, that cadin’.
“ ‘What’s want, Taff?’ yo’ say.”
“And what does he?” Arthur always asked.
“He wants a bit o’ bacca, my duckey.”
This story of Taffy would go on interminably, and everybody loved it.
Or sometimes it was a new tale.
“An’ what dost think, my darlin’? When I went to put my coat on at snap-time, what should go runnin’ up my arm but a mouse.
“ ‘Hey up, theer!’ I shouts.
“An’ wor just in time ter get ’im by th’ tail.”
“And did you kill it?”
