Excerpt from Thwarted or Ducks Eggs in a Hen's Nest: A Village Story Near the fire sat a little boy, making a wooden soldier, and a nice-looking girl of eighteen was laying the cloth for dinner. The widow herself, with arms bared to the elbow, was standing at a table in the window, sorting some clothes, preparatory to putting them into the wash-tub. Though worn with hard work, and pre maturely grey, she was evidently still young, and it was easy to see she must once have been very handsome. She had, even now, far more claim to real beauty than her young daughter, though the girl was more pleasing looking, from having an air of greater refinement. The mother was cast in a coarser mould. She was on a larger scale, though She was not SO tall and she was far more strongly built. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.