A Pair of Clogs

A Pair of Clogs, by Amy Walton

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Title: A Pair of Clogs
Author: Amy Walton
Illustrator: H.P.
Release Date: November 15, 2007 [EBook #23501]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAIR OF
CLOGS ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

A Pair of Clogs, and other stories, by Amy Walton.

STORY ONE, CHAPTER 1.

HER FIRST HOME.
"My! What a pretty pair of clogs baby's gotten!"
The street was narrow and very steep, and paved with round stones; on
each side of it were slate-coloured houses, some high, some low; and in
the middle of it stood baby, her curly yellow head bare, and her blue
cotton frock lifted high with both fat hands. She could not speak, but
she wanted to show that on her feet were tiny new clogs with bright
brass tips.
She stopped in front of all her acquaintances, men, women, children,
and even dogs. Each of them, except the last, made much the same
remark, and she then toddled cheerfully on, until nearly everyone in the
village of Haworth knew of this wonderful new thing.
The baby's mother lived in Haworth, but all day long she had to work
in the town of Keighley down below in the valley, for she was a
factory-girl. From the hillside you could see the thick veil of smoke,
never lifted, which hung over the tall chimneys and grey houses; the
people there very seldom saw the sky clear and blue, but up at Haworth
the wind blew freshly off the wide moor just above, and there was
nothing to keep away the sunshine. This was the reason that Maggie
Menzies still lived there, after she had taken to working in the factory;
it was a long walk to and from Keighley, but it was healthier for the
"li'le lass" to sleep in the fresh air. Everything in Maggie's life turned
upon that one small object; the "li'le lass" was her one treasure, her one
golden bit of happiness, the reason why she cared to see the sun shine,
or to eat, or drink, or rest, or to be alive at all. Except for the child she
was alone in the world, for her husband had been killed in an accident
two years ago, when the baby was only a month old. Since then she had
been Maggie's one thought and care; no one who has not at some time
in their lives spent all their affection on a single thing or person can at
all understand what she felt, or how strong her love was. It made all her
troubles and hardships easy merely to think of the child; just to call to
mind the dimples, and yellow hair, and fat hands, was enough to make
her deaf to the whirr and rattle of the restless machinery, and the harsh
tones of the overseer. When she began her work in the morning she

said to herself, "I shall see her in the evening;" and when it was
unusually tiresome during the day, and things went very wrong, she
could be patient and even cheerful when she remembered "it's fur her."
The factory-girls with boisterous good-nature had tried to make her
sociable when she first came; they invited her to stroll with them by the
river in the summer evenings, to stand and gossip with them at the
street corners, to join in their parties of pleasure on Sundays. But they
soon found it was of no use; Maggie's one idea, when work was over,
was to throw her little checked shawl over her head, and turn her steps
quickly towards a certain house in a narrow alley near the factory, for
there, under the care of a neighbour, she left her child during the day.
It would have been much better, everyone told her, to leave her up at
Haworth instead of bringing her into the smoky town; Maggie knew it,
but her answer was always the same to this advice:
"I couldn't bring myself to it," she said. "I niver could git through the
work if I didn't know she was near me."
So winter and summer, through the damp cold or the burning heat, she
might be seen coming quickly down the steep hill from Haworth every
morning clack, clack, in her wooden shoes, with her child in her arms.
In the evening her pace was slower, for she