called 'pastoral work in the Lord's service', if I
accompanied Mary Grace on her visits from house to house. If it
is remembered that I was only eight and a half when this scheme
was carried into practice, it will surprise no one to hear that
it was not crowned with success. I disliked extremely this
visitation of the poor. I felt shy, I had nothing to say, with
difficulty could I understand their soft Devonian patois, and
most of all--a signal perhaps of my neurotic condition--I dreaded
and loathed the smells of their cottages. One had to run over the
whole gamut of odours, some so faint that they embraced the
nostril with a fairy kiss, others bluntly gross, of the 'knock-
you-down' order; some sweet, with a dreadful sourness; some
bitter, with a smack of rancid hair-oil. There were fine manly
smells of the pigsty and the open drain, and these prided
themselves on being all they seemed to be; but there were also
feminine odours, masquerading as you knew not what, in which
penny whiffs, vials of balm and opoponax, seemed to have become
tainted, vaguely, with the residue of the slop-pail. It was not,
I think, that the villagers were particularly dirty, but those
were days before the invention of sanitary science, and my poor
young nose was morbidly, nay ridiculously sensitive. I often came
home from 'visiting the saints' absolutely incapable of eating
the milk-sop, with brown sugar strewn over it, which was my
evening meal.

There was one exception to my unwillingness to join in the
pastoral labours of Mary Grace. When she announced, on a fine
afternoon, that we were going to Pavor and Barton, I was always
agog to start. These were two hamlets in our parish, and, I
should suppose, the original home of its population. Pavor was,
even then, decayed almost to extinction, but Barton preserved its
desultory street of ancient, detached cottages. Each, however
poor, had a wild garden around it, and, where the inhabitants
possessed some pride in their surroundings, the roses and the
jasmines and that distinguished creeper,--which one sees nowhere
at its best but in Devonshire cottage-gardens,--the stately
cotoneaster, made the whole place a bower. Barton was in vivid
contrast to our own harsh, open, squalid village, with its mean
modern houses, its absence of all vegetation. The ancient
thatched cottages of Barton were shut in by moist hills, and
canopied by ancient trees; they were approached along a deep lane
which was al