or my own job,
that seems to be settin' still with my hands folded. Well, it's a brand
new one and it's goin' to take me one spell to get used to it."

It seemed likely to be a "spell" before I became accustomed to my own
"job," that of being a country gentleman with nothing to do but play the
part. When I went out to walk about the rectory garden, Grimmer touched
his hat. When, however, I ventured to pick a few flowers in that garden,
his expression of shocked disapproval was so marked that I felt I must
have made a dreadful mistake. I had, of course. Grimmer was in charge of
those flowers and if I wished any picked I was expected to tell him to
pick them. Picking them myself was equivalent to admitting that I was
not accustomed to having a gardener in my employ, in other words that
I was not a real gentleman at all. I might wait an hour for Johnson to
return from some errand or other and harness the horse; but I must on
no account save time by harnessing the animal myself. That sort of labor
was not done by the "gentry." I should have lost caste with the servants
a dozen times during my first few days in the rectory were it not for
one saving grace; I was an American, and almost any peculiar thing was
expected of an American.

When I strolled along the village street the male villagers, especially
the older ones, touched their hats to me. The old women bowed or
courtesied. Also they invariably paused, when I had passed, to stare
after me. The group at the blacksmith shop--where the stone coping of
the low wall was worn in hollows by the generations of idlers who had
sat upon it, just as their descendants were sitting upon it
now--turned, after I had passed, to stare. There would be a pause in the
conversation, then an outburst of talk and laughter. They were talking
about the "foreigner" of course, and laughing at him. At the
tailor's, where I sent my clothes to be pressed, the tailor himself, a
gray-haired, round-shouldered antique, ventured an opinion concerning
those clothes. "That coat was not made in England, sir," he said. "We
don't make 'em that way 'ere, sir. That's a bit foreign, that coat,
sir."

Yes, I was a foreigner. It was hard to realize. In a way everything was
so homelike; the people looked like people I had known at home, their
faces were New England faces quite as much as they were old England.
But their clothes were just a little different, and their ways were
different, and a dry-goods store wa