was her attendance at prayer-meetings when he said she should be at home
minding her children. He used to accuse her of carrying on with the
Scripture-readers, and to punish her he would say, "This week I'll spend
five bob more in the public--that'll teach you, if beating won't, that I
don't want none of your hypocritical folk hanging round my place." So it
befell the Saunders family to have little to eat; and Esther often
wondered how she should get a bit of dinner for her sick mother and her
hungry little brothers and sisters. Once they passed nearly thirty hours
without food. She called them round her, and knelt down amid them: they
prayed that God might help them; and their prayers were answered, for at
half-past twelve a Scripture lady came in with flowers in her hands. She
asked Mrs. Saunders how her appetite was. Mrs. Saunders answered that it
was more than she could afford, for there was nothing to eat in the house.
Then the Scripture lady gave them eighteen pence, and they all knelt down
and thanked God together.

But although Saunders spent a great deal of his money in the public-house,
he rarely got drunk and always kept his employment. He was a painter of
engines, a first-rate hand, earning good money, from twenty-five to thirty
shillings a week. He was a proud man, but so avaricious that he stopped at
nothing to get money. He was an ardent politician, yet he would sell his
vote to the highest bidder, and when Esther was seventeen he compelled her
to take service regardless of the character of the people or of what the
place was like. They had left Barnstaple many months, and were now living
in a little street off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, near the factory where
Saunders worked; and since they had been in London Esther had been
constantly in service. Why should he keep her? She wasn't one of his
children, he had quite enough of his own. Sometimes of an evening, when
Esther could escape from her drudgery for a few minutes, her mother would
step round, and mother and daughter, wrapped in the same shawl, would walk