s Prayer and the Creed. Then she inquired if she
could write. If she could, and she had liked all that had gone before,
her face sank--it was a great disappointment, for it was an all but
inviolable rule with her never to engage a servant who could write. But
I have known her ladyship break through it, although in both cases in
which she did so she put the girl's principles to a further and unusual
test in asking her to repeat the Ten Commandments. One pert young
woman--and yet I was sorry for her too, only she afterwards married a
rich draper in Shrewsbury--who had got through her trials pretty
tolerably, considering she could write, spoilt all, by saying glibly, at
the end of the last Commandment, "An't please your ladyship, I can cast
accounts."

"Go away, wench," said my lady in a hurry, "you're only fit for trade;
you will not suit me for a servant." The girl went away crestfallen: in
a minute, however, my lady sent me after her to see that she had
something to eat before leaving the house; and, indeed, she sent for her
once again, but it was only to give her a Bible, and to bid her beware of
French principles, which had led the French to cut off their king's and
queen's heads.

The poor, blubbering girl said, "Indeed, my lady, I wouldn't hurt a fly,
much less a king, and I cannot abide the French, nor frogs neither, for
that matter."

But my lady was inexorable, and took a girl who could neither read nor
write, to make up for her alarm about the progress of education towards
addition and subtraction; and afterwards, when the clergyman who was at
Hanbury parish when I came there, had died, and the bishop had appointed
another, and a younger man, in his stead, this was one of the points on
which he and my lady did not agree. While good old deaf Mr. Mountford
lived, it was my lady's custom, when indisposed for a sermon, to stand up
at the door of her large square pew,--just opposite to the
reading-desk,--and to say (at that part of the morning service where it
is decreed that, in quires and places where they sing, here followeth the
anthem): "Mr. Mountford, I will not trouble you for a discourse this
morning." And we all knelt down to the Litany with great satisfaction;
for Mr. Mountford, though he could not hear, had always his eyes open
about this part of the service, for any of my lady's movements. But the
new clergyman, Mr. Gray, was of a different stamp. He was very zealous
in all his parish work; an