esident had offered to himself. The boon was great to the Greenhow
family, who had often been hindered by weather from getting to Downhill.
Moreover, he had plans for one service and sermon in the week, and for
a cottage lecture at a distant hamlet.

Also, in the first fortnight of his stay, he had called at every house,
alike in Downhill and Uphill, to the great surprise of some of the
families, who had not in the memory of man seen a parson cross their
threshold. Some did not like it, such as old Dame Verdon, who, though
she could hardly get out of bed, was very sore about the new school; and
when her friends came to see her, told them wonderful stories which she
had picked up--or Lizzie had from some hawker--that the gentlefolks
thought there were too many children for the rates and taxes, and they
were going to get them all into the school, and make an end of them.
Sometimes she said it was by "giving of them all the cowpox," as Dame
Spurrell called vaccination as the fashion was in those parts, sometimes
it was by sending them all out to Botany Bay.

And as Mrs Carbonel had prevailed on the new gardener's wife to have
her baby vaccinated, and George Hewlett's and Mrs Mole's children had
been thence treated by her own hands, this was believed the more,
although none of the children were visibly the worse for it after the
first few days; but some of the women, and almost all the children
believed the story, and many of the little ones were in fits of terror
about the school, so that there was a falling off even with the Sunday
School. The new school was only an additional room to a good-sized
cottage, with a couple of windows and a brick floor, fitted with forms
without backs, but which had at least good firm legs to stand upon, pegs
for the cloaks and head-gear round the walls, and a single desk, likely
to be quite sufficient for the superior few who were to learn writing
and summing. The stock, obtained from the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge, consisted of a dozen copies of Mrs Trimmer's
Abridgment of the Old Testament, the same number of the lady's work on
the New Testament, a packet of little paper books of the Sermon on the
Mount, the Parables and the Miracles, and another packet of little
books, where the alphabet led the way upwards from ba, bo, etcetera, to
"Our cat can kill a rat; can she not?" Also the broken Catechism, and
Sellon's Abridgment of instruction on the Catechism. There were a