my reader,--did you ever upset your
ink-bottle, and watch, in helpless agony, the rapid spread of Stygian
blackness over your fair manuscript or fairer table-cover? With a like
inky swiftness did gossip now blacken the reputation of the Rev. Amos
Barton, causing the unfriendly to scorn and even the friendly to stand
aloof, at a time when difficulties of another kind were fast thickening
around him.

Chapter 6

One November morning, at least six months after the Countess Czerlaski
had taken up her residence at the vicarage, Mrs. Hackit heard that her
neighbour Mrs. Patten had an attack of her old complaint, vaguely called
'the spasms'. Accordingly, about eleven o'clock, she put on her velvet
bonnet and cloth cloak, with a long boa and muff large enough to stow a
prize baby in; for Mrs. Hackit regulated her costume by the calendar, and
brought out her furs on the first of November; whatever might be the
temperature. She was not a woman weakly to accommodate herself to
shilly-shally proceedings. If the season didn't know what it ought to do,
Mrs. Hackit did. In her best days, it was always sharp weather at
'Gunpowder Plot', and she didn't like new fashions.

And this morning the weather was very rationally in accordance with her
costume, for as she made her way through the fields to Cross Farm, the
yellow leaves on the hedge-girt elms, which showed bright and golden
against the long-hanging purple clouds, were being scattered across the
grassy path by the coldest of November winds. 'Ah,' Mrs. Hackit thought
to herself, 'I daresay we shall have a sharp pinch this winter, and if we
do, I shouldn't wonder if it takes the old lady off. They say a green
Yule makes a fat churchyard; but so does a white Yule too, for that
matter. When the stool's rotten enough, no matter who sits on it.'

However, on her arrival at Cross Farm, the prospect of Mrs. Patten's
decease was again thrown into the dim distance in her imagination, for
Miss Janet Gibbs met her with the news that Mrs. Patten was much better,
and led her, without any preliminary announcement, to the old lady's
bedroom. Janet had scarcely reached the end of her circumstantial
narrative how the attack came on and what were her aunt's sensations--a
narrative to which Mrs. Patten, in her neatly-plaited nightcap, seemed to
listen with a contemptuous resignation to her niece's historical
inaccuracy, contenting herself with occasionally confounding Janet by a
shake of