d as soon as the
carrier's cart of Long Whindale, which she was now anxiously awaiting,
should have arrived, bearing with it the produce of that adventure, Mrs.
Thornburgh would be a proud woman, prepared to meet a legion of rectors'
wives without flinching. Not, indeed, in all respects a woman at peace
with herself and the world. In the country, where every household should
be self-contained, a certain discredit attaches in every well-regulated
mind to 'getting things in.' Mrs. Thornburgh was also nervous at the
thought of the bill. It would have to be met gradually out of the weekly
money. For 'William' was to know nothing of the matter, except so far as
a few magnificent generalities and the testimony of his own dazzled eyes
might inform him. But after all, in this as in everything else, one must
suffer to be distinguished.

The carrier, however, lingered. And at last the drowsiness of the
afternoon overcame even those pleasing expectations we have described,
and Mrs. Thornburgh's newspaper dropped unheeded to her feet. The
vicarage, under the shade of which she was sitting, was a new gray stone
building with wooden gables, occupying the site of what had once been
the earlier vicarage house of Long Whindale, the primitive
dwelling-house of an incumbent, whose chapelry, after sundry
augmentations, amounted to just twenty-seven pounds a year. The modern
house, though it only contained sufficient accommodation for Mr. and
Mrs. Thornburgh, one guest, and two maids, would have seemed palatial to
those rustic clerics of the past from whose ministrations the lonely
valley had drawn its spiritual sustenance in times gone by. They,
indeed, had belonged to another race--a race sprung from the soil and
content to spend the whole of life in very close contact and very homely
intercourse with their mother earth. Mr. Thornburgh, who had come to the
valley only a few years before from a parish in one of the large
manufacturing towns, and who had no inherited interest in the Cumbrian
folk and their ways, had only a very faint idea, and that a distinctly
depreciatory one, of what these mythical predecessors of his, with their
strange social status and unbecoming occupations, might be like. But
there were one or two old men still lingering in the dale who could have
told him a great deal about them, whose memory went back to the days
when the relative social importance of the dale parsons was exactly
expressed by the characteristic We