self might be hard pushed to say what good I hoped to do by coming
thus to Shoxford. I knew of a great many things, for certain, that never
had been thoroughly examined here; also I naturally wished to see, being
a native, what the natives were; and, much more than that, it was always
on my mind that here lay my mother and the other six of us.

Therefore it was an impatient thing for me to hear Betsy working out the
afternoon with perpetual chatter and challenge of prices, combating now
as a lodger all those points which as a landlady she never would allow
even to be moot questions. If any applicant in European Square had dared
so much as hint at any of all the requirements which she now expected
gratis, she would simply have whisked her duster, and said that the
lodgings for such people must be looked for down the alley. However,
Mrs. Busk, our new landlady, although she had a temper of her own (as
any one keeping a post-office must have) was forced by the rarity
of lodgers here to yield many points, which Mrs. Strouss, on her own
boards, would not even have allowed to be debated. All this was entirely
against my wish; for when I have money, I spend it, finding really no
other good in it; but Betsy told me that the purest principle of all
was--not to be cheated.

So I left her to have these little matters out, and took that occasion
for stealing away (as the hours grew on toward evening) to a place where
I wished to be quite alone. And the shadow of the western hills shed
peace upon the valley, when I crossed a little stile leading into
Shoxford church-yard.

For a minute or two I was quite afraid, seeing nobody any where about,
nor even hearing any sound in the distance to keep me company. For the
church lay apart from the village, and was thickly planted out from it,
the living folk being full of superstition, and deeply believing in the
dead people's ghosts. And even if this were a wife to a husband, or even
a husband reappearing to his wife, there was not a man or a woman in the
village that would not run away from it.

This I did not know at present, not having been there long enough;
neither had I any terror of that sort, not being quite such a coward, I
should hope. But still, as the mantles of the cold trees darkened, and
the stony remembrance of the dead grew pale, and of the living there was
not even the whistle of a grave-digger--my heart got the better of
my mind for a moment, and made me long to be acro