elow me was wilder than
verdant Normandy.

No words can tell how I rejoiced in this untrodden region--this
severance from the Strand and Temple Bar. I felt as if my old life was
falling away from me--like the scales of the lepers who were cleansed
by the Divine Healer. I felt myself worthier to love, or even to be
loved by, the bright true-hearted girl whose image fills my heart. Ah,
if Heaven gave me that dear angel, I think my old life, my old
recklessness, my old want of principle, would drop away from me
altogether, and the leper would stand forth cleansed and whole. Could I
not be happy with her here, among these forgotten hills, these widely
scattered homesteads? Could I not be happy dissevered eternally from
billiard-room and kursaal, race-ground and dancing-rooms? Yes,
completely and unreservedly happy--happy as a village curate with
seventy pounds a year and a cast-off coat, supplied by the charity of a
land too poor to pay its pastors the wage of a decent butler--happy as
a struggling farmer, though the clay soil of my scanty acres were never
so sour and stubborn, my landlord never so hard about his rent--happy
as a pedlar, with my pack of cheap tawdry wares slung behind me, and my
Charlotte tramping gaily by my side.

I breakfasted next morning in a snug little parlour behind the bar,
where I overheard two carters conversing in the Carthaginian _patois_,
to which I became hourly more accustomed. My brisk cheery landlady came
in and out while I took my meal; and whenever I could detain her long
enough, I tried to engage her in conversation.

I asked her if she had ever heard the name of Meynell; and after
profound consideration she replied in the negative.

"I don't mind hearing aught of folks called Meynell," she said with
more or less of the _patois_, which I was beginning to understand; "but
I haven't got mooch memory for nee-ams. I might have heard o' such
folks, and not minded t' nee-am."

This was rather dispiriting; but I knew that if any record of Christian
Meynell's daughter existed at Huxter's Cross, it was in my power to
discover it.

I asked if there was any official in the way of a registrar to be found
in the village; and found that there was no one more important than an
old man who kept the keys of the church. The registers were kept in the
vestry, my landlady believed, and the old man was called Jonas Gorles,
and lived half a mile off, at the homestead of his son-in-law. But my
landlad