d it was easy,
and with his help she succeeded.

One afternoon, wet and dreary, Miriam had taken up her book. There was
nothing to do in the shop, and Mr. Farrow entered the parlour in one of
his idle moods, repeating the same behaviour which had so often
distressed Miriam when she was reading anything for which he did not
care. She had recovered from the dust upstairs a ragged volume in
paper boards, and she was musing over the lines--

"But bound and fixed in fettered solitude
To pine, the prey of every changing mood."

The poem was about as remote in its whole conception and treatment from
Mr. Farrow as it could well be, and his monkey-tricks exasperated her.
She shut her book in wrath and misery, left the room, dressed, and went
out. The sky had cleared, and just after the sunset there lay a long
lake of tenderest bluish-green above the horizon in the west, bounded
on its upper coast by the dark grey cloud which the wind was slowly
bearing eastward. In the midst of that lake of bluish-green lay Venus,
glittering like molten silver. Miriam's first thought was her husband.
She always thought of him when she looked at planets or stars, because
he was so intimately connected with them in her mind. She waited till
it was late and she then turned homewards. A man overtook her whom she
recognised at once as Fitchew the jobbing gardener, porter, rough
carpenter, creature of all work in Cowfold, one of the honestest souls
in the place. He had his never-failing black pipe in his mouth, which
he removed for a moment in order to bid her good-night. She kept up
with him, for it was dusk, and she was glad to walk by his side.
Fitchews had lived in Cowfold for centuries. An old parson always
maintained that the name was originally Fitz-Hugh, but this particular
representative of the family was certainly not a Fitz-Hugh but a
Fitchew, save that he was as independent as a baron, and,
notwithstanding his poverty, cared little or nothing what people
thought about him. He could neither read nor write, and was full of
the most obstinate and absurd prejudices. He was incredulous of
everything which was said to him by people with any education, but what
he had heard from those who were as uneducated as himself, or the
beliefs, if such they can be called, which grew in his skull
mysteriously, by spontaneous generation, he held most tenaciously. His
literature was Cowfold, the people, the animals, the inanimate objects