thought of the bill. It would have to be met gradually out of the weekly
money. For 'William' was to know nothing of the matter, except so far as
a few magnificent generalities and the testimony of his own dazzled eyes
might inform him. But after all, in this as in everything else, one must
suffer to be distinguished.

The carrier, however, lingered. And at last the drowsiness of the
afternoon overcame even those pleasing expectations we have described,
and Mrs. Thornburgh's newspaper dropped unheeded to her feet. The
vicarage, under the shade of which she was sitting, was a new gray-stone
building with wooden gables, occupying the site of what had once been
the earlier vicarage house of Long Whindale, the primitive dwelling
house of an incumbent, whose chapelry, after sundry augmentations,
amounted to just twenty-seven pounds a year. The modern house, though it
only contained sufficient accommodation for Mr. and Mrs. Thornburgh, one
guest and two maids, would have seemed palatial to those rustic clerics
of the past from whose ministrations the lonely valley had drawn its
spiritual sustenance in times gone by. They, indeed, had belonged to
another race--a race sprung from the soil and content to spend the whole
of life in very close contact and very homely intercourse with their
mother earth. Mr. Thornburgh, who had come to the valley only a few
years before from a parish in one of the large manufacturing towns, and
who had no inherited interest in the Cumbrian folk and their ways, had
only a very faint idea, and that a distinctly depreciatory one, of what
these mythical predecessors of his, with their strange social status and
unbecoming occupations, might be like. But there were one or two old men
still lingering in the dale who could have told him a great deal about
them, whose memory went back to the days when the relative social
importance of the dale parsons was exactly expressed by the
characteristic Westmoreland saying: 'Ef ye'll nobbut send us a gude
schulemeaster, a verra' moderate parson 'ull dea!' and whose slow minds,
therefore, were filled with a strong inarticulate sense of difference
as they saw him pass along the road, and recalled the incumbent of their
childhood, dropping in for his 'crack' and his glass of 'yale' at this
or that farm-house on any occasion of local festivity, or driving his
sheep to Whinborough market with his own hands like any other peasant of
the dale.

Within the last twenty ye