to quaver out tunes
of immortality. It is a bad thing to be very old. Of all the bad
things life forces upon us as we pass along it is the last and
worst--the bitterness at the bottom of the cup, the dregs of what for
many was after all always only medicine. Mrs. Jones had just enough of
the strength of fear left to keep quite still while the vicar's wife
read the Gospel in a voice that anger made harsh; but when she had
gone, after a parting admonition and a dreadful assurance that she
would come again soon, the tears rolled unchecked and piteous, and it
was a mercy that Priscilla also took it into her head to look in on
her way to church, for if she had not I don't know who would have
dried them for this poor baby of eighty-five. And I regret to say that
Priscilla's ideas of doing good were in such a state of crudeness that
she had no sooner mastered the facts brokenly sobbed out than she ran
to the cupboard and gave Mrs. Jones a tablespoonful of rum for the
strengthening of her body and then took out her purse and gave her
another five-pound note for the comforting of her soul. And then she
wiped her eyes, and patted her, and begged her not to mind. Such
conduct was, I suppose, what is called indiscriminate charity and
therefore blameworthy, but its effect was great. Priscilla went to
church with the reflection of the old lady's wonder and joy shining in
her own face. "Hide it," had been her last words at the door, her
finger on her lips, her head nodding expressively in the direction of
the vicarage; and by this advice she ranged herself once and for all
on the opposite side to Mrs. Morrison and the followers of obedience
and order. Mrs. Jones would certainly have taken her for an angel
working miracles with five-pound notes and an inexhaustible pocket if
it had not been for the rum; even in her rapture she did feel that a
genuine angel would be incapable of any really harmonious combination
with rum. But so far had she fallen from the kind of thinking that the
vicar's wife thought proper in a person so near her end that she
boldly told herself she preferred Priscilla.

Now this was the day of Priscilla's children's party, and though all
Symford had been talking of it for twenty-four hours the news of it
had not yet reached Mrs. Morrison's ears. The reason was that Symford
talked in whispers, only too sure that the authorities would consider
it wrong for it to send its children a-merrymaking on a Sunday, and
despe