illage. But the bigwigs of the
county, and every clergyman's wife within a radius of ten miles, were of
another mind. She had not been "proper" to begin with--at least, they
said so; and as time went on she took no pains to be more "proper" than
she was at first. Her improprieties, so far as I could ever learn, arose
from nothing more heinous than her possession of an intelligence more
powerful and a courage more daring than that to which any of her
neighbours could lay claim. Her outspokenness was a stumbling-block to
many; and the offence of speaking her mind was aggravated by the
circumstance, not always present at such times, that she had a mind to
speak. To quote the language in which Farmer Perryman once explained the
situation to me: "She'd given all on 'em a taste o' the whip, and with
some on 'em she'd peppered and salted the sore place into the bargain."
Moreover, she sided with many things that a clergyman's wife ought to
oppose: took all sorts of undesirables under her protection, helped
those whom everybody else wanted to punish, threw good discretion to the
winds, and sometimes mixed in undertakings which no "lady" ought to
touch. To all this she added the impertinence of regular attendance at
church, where she recited the Creeds in a rich voice that almost drowned
her husband's, turning punctually to the East and bowing at the Sacred
Name. That she was a hypocrite trying to save her face was, of course,
obvious to every Scribe and Pharisee in the county. But the poor of
Deadborough preferred her hypocrisy to the virtuous simplicity of her
critics.

Mrs. Abel is too great a subject for such humble portraiture as I can
attempt, and she will henceforth appear in these pages only as occasion
requires. It is time that we turn to the men.

The first of these was Robert Dellanow, known far and wide as "Snarley
Bob," head shepherd to Sam Perryman of the Upper Farm. I say, the first;
for it was he who had the pre-eminence, both as to intelligence and the
tragic antagonisms of his life. The man had many singularities, singular
at least in shepherds. Perhaps the chief of these was the violence of
the affinities and repulsions that broke forth from him towards every
personality with whom he came into any, even the slightest, contact.
Snarley invariably loved or hated at first sight, or rather at first
sound, for he was strangely sensitive to the tones of a human voice. If,
as seldom happened, your voice and presence