, if she had looked more narrowly at her own imaginations of
poverty, she would perhaps have discovered on the visionary table always
a delicate dish for her husband--in the wardrobe, always a sleek black
coat--and in his waiting-room, a clear fire in winter; while the rest of
the picture was made up of bread and vegetables, and shabby gowns for
herself, and devices to keep herself warm without burning fuel. Her
imagination was rather amused than alarmed with anticipations of this
sort of poverty. It was certainly not poverty that she dreaded. A more
serious question was, how she could bear to see her husband supplanted,
and, in the eyes of others, disgraced. This question the husband and
wife now often asked each other, and always concluded by agreeing that
time must show.

The girl at the almshouses died in a fortnight. Some pains were taken
to conceal from the doctor the time and the precise spot of her
burial-points which the doctor never thought of inquiring about, and of
which it was therefore easy to keep him in ignorance. A few of the
neighbouring cottagers agreed to watch the grave for ten nights, to save
the body from the designs of evil surgeons. One of the watchers
reported, after the seventh night, that he had plainly heard a horse
coming along the road, and that he rather thought it stopped opposite
the churchyard. He had raised himself up, and coughed aloud, and that
was no doubt the reason why nobody came: the horse must have turned back
and gone away, whoever might be with it. This put people on the watch;
and on the eighth night two men walked about the churchyard. They had
to tell that they once thought they had caught the doctor in the fact.
They had both heard a loud whistle, and had stood to see what would come
of it (they could see very well, for it had dawned some time). A person
came through the turnstile with a sack, which seemed to leave his
intentions in no doubt. They hid themselves behind two opposite trees,
and both sprang out upon him at once: but it was only the miller's boy
on his way to the mill. On the ninth and tenth nights nothing happened;
the neighbours began to feel the want of their regular sleep; and the
querulous grandmother, who seemed more angry that they meant to leave
the poor girl's body to itself now, than pleased that it had been
watched at all, was compelled to put up with assurances that doctors
were considered to wish to cut up bodies within the first ten