paid for it. Again, however
simple-hearted and courteous he may be, he never gets very close home to
the poor. Their life is not his life, nor their ways his ways. They do
not understand his refinement, his delicacy about interference, his
gentlemanly reticence, his abhorrence of gossip and scandal. They are
accustomed to be ordered about, to rough words, to gossip over their
neighbours. And so the District Visitor is "more in their way," as they
tell her. She is profuse of questions, routing out a thousand little
details that no parson would ever know. She has little of the sensitive
pride that hinders the vicar from listening to scandal, or of the manly
objection to "telling tales" which hurries him out of the room when
neighbour brings charges against neighbour. She is entirely unaffected
by his scruples against interference with the conscience or religion of
the poor. "Where do you go to church?" and "Why don't you go to church?"
are her first stock questions in her cross-examination of every family.
Her exhortations at the sick-bed have a somewhat startling
peremptoriness about them. We can hardly wonder at the wish of a poor
patient that she were a rich one, because then she could "die in peace,
and have nobody to come in and pray over her." What irritates the
District Visitor in cases where she has bestowed special religious
attention is that people when so effectively prepared for death "won't
die." But hard, practical action such as this does not jostle against
the feelings of the poor as it would against our own. Women especially
forgive all because the District Visitor listens as well as talks. They
could no more pour out their little budget of domestic troubles to the
parson than to a being from another world. But the District Visitor is
the recipient of all. The washerwoman stops her mangle to talk about the
hard times and the rise of a halfpenny on the loaf. The matron next door
turns up her sleeve to show the bruise her husband bestowed on her on
his return from the 'Chequers.' She enters largely and minutely into the
merits and defects of her partner's character, and protests with a
subtle discrimination that "he's a good father when he ain't bothered
with the children, and a good husband when he's off the drink." The old
widow down the lane is waiting for "the lady" to write a letter for her
to her son in Australia, and to see the "pictur," the cheap photograph
of the grandchildren she has never seen or w