eration, and was alone in it.

I was to sleep at my sister's house that night, but I had no wish to go
there now. Doctor Wardle's forced gravity, his cheerful condolences,
rather worried me. So it happened that I set out to walk from the
churchyard, and presently found myself upon the winding upland road that
led out of the rich Davenham valley, over the Ridgeway, and into the
hilly Tarn Regis country, where I was born.

I drank a mug of cider in the quaint little beerhouse kept by Gammer Joy
in Tarn Regis, and read again the doggerel her grandfather had painted
on its sign-board, in which the traveller was advised of the various
uses of liquor, taken in moderation, and the evil effects of its abuse.
Taken wisely, I remember, it was suggested that liquor proved the best
of lubricants for the wheels of life. Mrs. Joy looked just as old and
just as active and rosy as she had always looked for so long as I could
remember; and she hospitably insisted upon my eating a large slab of her
dough cake with my cider--a very excellent comestible it was.

The old dame's mood was cheerfully pessimistic--that is to say, she was
garrulous, and spoke cheerily of generally downward tendencies. Thus,
the new rector, by her way of it, was of a decadent modern type, full of
newfangled "Papish" notions as to church vestments and early services,
and neglectful of traditional responsibilities connected with soup and
coal and medical comforts. Cider was no longer what it used to be, I
gathered, since the big brewers took it in hand, and spoiled the trade
of those who had hand-presses. As for farming, Gammer Joy held that it
was not near so good a trade for master or man with land at fifteen
shillings the acre, as much of it was thereabouts, as it had been with
rents up to two or three pounds, and food twice as dear as now.

"But there, Master Dick," said the old lady; "I suppose we be all
Germans now--so they do tell me, however; an' if we be no better nor
furriners here in Darset, why I doan't know as't matters gertly wha'
cwomes to us at all. But I will say things wor different in your
feyther's time, Master Dick--that they was. Ah doan't believe he'd ha'
put up wi' this German business for a minute, that ah doan't."

I gathered that the new rector was an earnest young man and a hard
worker; but, evidently, those of Gammer Joy's generation preferred my
father's aloofness in conjunction with his regular material
dispensations, and his habi