






Transcribed from the 1896 Smith, Elder and Co. "Lizzie Leigh and Other
Tales" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk.  Proofed by
Jennifer Lee, Alev Akman and Andy Wallace.





THE HALF-BROTHERS
by Elizabeth Gaskell


My mother was twice married.  She never spoke of her first husband, and
it is only from other people that I have learnt what little I know about
him.  I believe she was scarcely seventeen when she was married to him:
and he was barely one-and-twenty.  He rented a small farm up in
Cumberland, somewhere towards the sea-coast; but he was perhaps too young
and inexperienced to have the charge of land and cattle: anyhow, his
affairs did not prosper, and he fell into ill health, and died of
consumption before they had been three years man and wife, leaving my
mother a young widow of twenty, with a little child only just able to
walk, and the farm on her hands for four years more by the lease, with
half the stock on it dead, or sold off one by one to pay the