ars--not enough to learn English in. So, when
addressed, they remained a speechless group, too unaccustomed to man
to be able to say where keys of churches were to be had, or anything
else. But the eldest, a very little girl in a flexible blue bonnet,
murmured what Sally, with insight, interpreted into a reference.

"Yes, dear, that's right. You go and tell moarther t' whoam that
a lady and gentleman want to see inside the church, and ask for the
key." Whereupon the little maid departs down a passage into a smell
of wallflowers, and is heard afar rendering her message as a long
narrative--so long that Dr. Conrad says the child cannot have
understood right, and they had better prosecute inquiry further.
Sally thinks otherwise, and says men are impatient fidgets.

The resolute dumbness of one of the small natives must have been
a _parti-pris_, for it suddenly disappeared during his sister's
absence, and he gave a narrative of a family dissension, not
necessarily recent. He appears proud of his own share in it, which
Sally nevertheless felt she could not appear to sanction by silence.

"You bad little boy," she said. "You smacked your sister Elizabeth in
t' oy, and your foarther smacked you. I hope he hurt." The bad little
boy assented with a nod, and supplied some further details. Then he
asked for a penny before his sister Elizabeth came back. He wanted it
to buy almond-rock, but he wouldn't give any of it to Jacob, nor to
his sister Elizabeth, nor to Reuben, nor to many others, whom he
seemed to exclude from almond-rock with rapture. Asked to whom he
would give some, then, he replied: "Not you--eat it moyself!" and
laughed heartlessly. Sally, we regret to say, gave this selfish
little boy a penny for not being hypocritical. And then his sister
Elizabeth reappeared with the key, which was out of scale with her,
like St. Peter's.

The inward splendours of this church had been inferred by Sally from
a tiptoe view through the window, which commanded its only archaic
object of interest--the monument of a woolstapler who, three hundred
and odd years ago, had the effrontery to have two wives and sixteen
children. He ought to have had one or two more wives, thought Dr.
Conrad. However, the family was an impressive one now, decorated as
it was with roses cut out of turnips, and groups of apples and carrots
and cereals. And no family could have kneeled down more symmetrically,
even in 1580.

But there was plenty to see in t