great patches on his moleskin pit trousers, which he would often do,
considering them too dirty, and the stuff too hard, for his wife to
mend.
But the best time for the young children was when he made fuses. Morel
fetched a sheaf of long sound wheat-straws from the attic. These he
cleaned with his hand, till each one gleamed like a stalk of gold, after
which he cut the straws 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 rifled 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
bunged 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 duckie."
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' I wor just in time ter get 'im by th' tail."
"And did you kill it?"
"I did, for they're a nuisance. The place is fair snied wi' 'em."
"An' what do they live on?"
"The corn as the 'osses drops--an' they'll get in your pocket an' eat
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