APTER XIV.

KENELM rose betimes the next morning somewhat stiff and uneasy, but
sufficiently recovered to feel ravenous. Fortunately, one of the
young ladies, who attended specially to the dairy, was already up, and
supplied the starving hero with a vast bowl of bread and milk. He then
strolled into the hayfield, in which there was now very little left
to do, and but few hands besides his own were employed. Jessie was not
there. Kenelm was glad of that. By nine o'clock his work was over, and
the farmer and his men were in the yard completing the ricks. Kenelm
stole away unobserved, bent on a round of visits. He called first at the
village shop kept by Mrs. Bawtrey, which Jessie had pointed out to
him, on pretence of buying a gaudy neckerchief; and soon, thanks to his
habitual civility, made familiar acquaintance with the shopwoman. She
was a little sickly old lady, her head shaking, as with palsy, somewhat
deaf, but still shrewd and sharp, rendered mechanically so by long
habits of shrewdness and sharpness. She became very communicative, spoke
freely of her desire to give up the shop, and pass the rest of her days
with a sister, widowed like herself, in a neighbouring town. Since she
had lost her husband, the field and orchard attached to the shop had
ceased to be profitable, and become a great care and trouble; and the
attention the shop required was wearisome. But she had twelve years
unexpired of the lease granted for twenty-one years to her husband on
low terms, and she wanted a premium for its transfer, and a purchaser
for the stock of the shop. Kenelm soon drew from her the amount of the
sum she required for all,--L45.

"You be n't thinking of it for yourself?" she asked, putting on her
spectacles, and examining him with care.

"Perhaps so, if one could get a decent living out of it. Do you keep a
book of your losses and your gains?"

"In course, sir," she said proudly. "I kept the books in my goodman's
time, and he was one who could find out if there was a farthing wrong,
for he had been in a lawyer's office when a lad."

"Why did he leave a lawyer's office to keep a little shop?"

"Well, he was born a farmer's son in this neighbourhood, and he always
had a hankering after the country, and--and besides that--"

"Yes."

"I'll tell you the truth; he had got into a way of drinking speerrits,
and he was a good young man, and wanted to break himself of it, and he
took the temperance oath; but it was too hard