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THE HISTORY OF

MARY AND HER FAMILY.

CHAPTER I.

CUTHBERT AND NELLY JONES.

"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it."-PROV. xxii. 6.

CUTHBERT JONES was an honest man, and an industrious labourer. He and his wife Nelly lived in a white, thatched cottage, which stood on the top of a little hill, in a village in the country. The house was getting old, but Cuthbert had lived there all his life, for it was his father's before him, therefore he loved the place, and would not have changed it even for a better. It was also on the whole a comfortable dwelling. The chambers were not ceiled, and there

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was only a ladder for a staircase, but every autumn Cuthbert filled up the holes in the thatch with fresh straw, and after their hard day's work they slept soundly and rose up refreshed. Nelly's furniture, like her house, had seen its best days, but it always looked tidy; her husband was clever at mending up the old things, when they wanted a nail or a piece of wood to keep them together. Most of it had been Cuthbert's father's. Cuthbert and his wife married when very young, before they had laid by any thing, and this was the reason why they had but few comforts round them. There was a piece of garden-ground in front of the house, and a small orchard at the side. In these every thing looked fresh year after year, when God's own hand clothed all the trees with life and beauty, making them to blossom and bud and bring forth fruit, and causing every herb and plant to grow up out of the ground. Cuthbert and Nelly

had had a large family, but they had lost several of their children by death. The two eldest daughters were married and living in London; and two sons had places in farmhouses in the neighbourhood. Mary, their youngest child, was the only one left at home. But the old logs of wood were still standing inside the open chimney, on which their children used to sit on winter evenings twenty years before. Cuthbert had the comfort of knowing that all his children ate the bread of honest labour,; and Mary, his youngest, was still left to make his cottage. cheerful. Her face was as bright as the flowers in the spring, and she would often sing as merrily as the birds in the green branches.

Neither Cuthbert nor his wife could read. There was no school in the village when they were young. Soon after their marriage a good minister came to the place, and set up a week-day and Sunday school.

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