Gods, were not only very
perceptibly aged, but also extremely dirty. This latter point Mr.
Bensington did not observe, because nothing destroys the powers of
general observation quite so much as a life of experimental science.
They were named Skinner, Mr. and Mrs. Skinner, and Mr. Bensington
interviewed them in a small room with hermetically sealed windows, a
spotted overmantel looking-glass, and some ailing calceolarias.

Mrs. Skinner was a very little old woman, capless, with dirty white hair
drawn back very very tightly from a face that had begun by being
chiefly, and was now, through the loss of teeth and chin, and the
wrinkling up of everything else, ending by being almost
exclusively--nose. She was dressed in slate colour (so far as her dress
had any colour) slashed in one place with red flannel. She let him in
and talked to him guardedly and peered at him round and over her nose,
while Mr. Skinner she alleged made some alteration in his toilette. She
had one tooth that got into her articulations and she held her two long
wrinkled hands nervously together. She told Mr. Bensington that she had
managed fowls for years; and knew all about incubators; in fact, they
themselves had run a Poultry Farm at one time, and it had only failed at
last through the want of pupils. "It's the pupils as pay," said Mrs.
Skinner.

Mr. Skinner, when he appeared, was a large-faced man, with a lisp and a
squint that made him look over the top of your head, slashed slippers
that appealed to Mr. Bensington's sympathies, and a manifest shortness
of buttons. He held his coat and shirt together with one hand and traced
patterns on the black-and-gold tablecloth with the index finger of the
other, while his disengaged eye watched Mr. Bensington's sword of
Damocles, so to speak, with an expression of sad detachment. "You don't
want to run thith Farm for profit. No, Thir. Ith all the thame, Thir.
Ekthperimenth! Prethithely."

He said they could go to the farm at once. He was doing nothing at
Dunton Green except a little tailoring. "It ithn't the thmart plathe I
thought it wath, and what I get ithent thkarthely worth having," he
said, "tho that if it ith any convenienth to you for uth to come...."

And in a week Mr. and Mrs. Skinner were installed in the farm, and the
jobbing carpenter from Hickleybrow was diversifying the task of erecting
runs and henhouses with a systematic discussion of Mr. Bensington.

"I haven't theen much of 'im yet,"