The second day after their departure from home, she told her mamma she had, in one of her rambles into a narrow lane, seen a poor boy in great danger of being beaten by a woman who appeared to be mistress of a small cottage adjoining to that at the door of which he stood, and who threatened to lay a stick (which she held in her hand) over his shoulders, if ever he dared to touch her pears again. "But," said Matilda, "the boy insisted that they were not her pears, but his father's, and that he was in his father's garden when he picked them from a bough which hung down almost into his mouth."