A SixMonths' Friend Author:Helen Shipton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. LITTLEMORE. [hatever faults win might have had to find with his old home, he had certainly picked out a strange new one for himself, an... more »d many people would have thought that he had made a 'poor exchange. Thirty years before Littlemore had been a quiet little scattered parish of about six hundred souls. It had a little church and a clergyman of its own, and lay fully two miles from anything that could be called a town. But now all was changed, as much changed as well could be. A railway ran through the little village, and there was a station just on the outskirts. Pits had beensunk in one part of it and huge iron-furnaces built in another, and all that end of the parish that lay nearest to the town and farthest from the church was built over with rows of red-brick houses. Street beyond street they spread, with shops here and there and a public-house at nearly every corner, till the place looked like a dingy squalid little town. The clergyman of the place did his best, but no man could keep pace with a population that went up in a few years from some hundreds to as many thousands. And they were a rough lot, these colliers and ironworkers. It was a boast with some of them, that they feared neither God nor man; and I am afraid that it was partly true. They seldom stayed very long in one place, or moved very far away, but " flitted," as they called it, every few months or so. Before they had been in a place six months they would generally find a reason for leaving it; and then, perhaps, in a year or two you would find them back in their old quartersagain, having made two or three moves in the meantime. All day long, and nearly all night, the streets were noisy with lounging men, gossiping women, and playing children ; and the little dingy houses—built ...« less