Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man.  It was because he was little that he had not gone for a soldier.  He had remained at home and worked.  His first recollections were connected with work.  He knew nothing else but work.  He had worked all his days, and at seventy-one he still worked.  Each morning saw him up with the lark and afield, a day labourer, for as such he had been born.  Mrs. Mugridge was seventy-three.  From seven years of age she had worked in the fields, doing a boy’s work at first, and later a man’s.  She still worked, keeping the house shining, washing, boiling, and baking, and, with my advent, cooking for me and shaming me by making my bed.  At the end of threescore years and more of work they possessed nothing, had nothing to look forward to save more work.  And they were contented.  They expected nothing else, desired nothing else.

They lived simply.  Their wants were few—­a pint of beer at the end of the day, sipped in the semi-subterranean kitchen, a weekly paper to pore over for seven nights hand-running, and conversation as meditative and vacant as the chewing of a heifer’s cud.  From a wood engraving on the wall a slender, angelic girl looked down upon them, and underneath was the legend:  “Our Future Queen.”  And from a highly coloured lithograph alongside looked down a stout and elderly lady, with underneath:  “Our Queen—­Diamond Jubilee.”

“What you earn is sweetest,” quoth Mrs. Mugridge, when I suggested that it was about time they took a rest.

“No, an’ we don’t want help,” said Thomas Mugridge, in reply to my question as to whether the children lent them a hand.

“We’ll work till we dry up and blow away, mother an’ me,” he added; and Mrs. Mugridge nodded her head in vigorous indorsement.

Fifteen children she had borne, and all were away and gone, or dead.  The “baby,” however, lived in Maidstone, and she was twenty-seven.  When the children married they had their hands full with their own families and troubles, like their fathers and mothers before them.

Where were the children?  Ah, where were they not?  Lizzie was in Australia; Mary was in Buenos Ayres; Poll was in New York; Joe had died in India—­and so they called them up, the living and the dead, soldier and sailor, and colonist’s wife, for the traveller’s sake who sat in their kitchen.

They passed me a photograph.  A trim young fellow, in soldier’s garb looked out at me.

“And which son is this?” I asked.

They laughed a hearty chorus.  Son!  Nay, grandson, just back from Indian service and a soldier-trumpeter to the King.  His brother was in the same regiment with him.  And so it ran, sons and daughters, and grand sons and daughters, world-wanderers and empire-builders, all of them, while the old folks stayed at home and worked at building empire too.

   “There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
      And a wealthy wife is she;
   She breeds a breed o’ rovin’ men
      And casts them over sea.