s moment down the
garden path, in order to fill her soul with reproaches at the iniquity of
the weeds, which grew faster than she or her good man cared to remove
them, stopped in mute discomfiture before the presence of a more
magnificent grievance. And then, in the hour of her calamity, she turned
instinctively to the Great Mother, and gathered in her capacious hands
large clods of the hard brown soil that lay at her feet. With a terrible
sincerity of purpose, though with a contemptible inadequacy of aim, she
rained her earth bolts at the marauder, and the bursting pellets called
forth a flood of cackling protest and panic from the hastily departing
fowl. Calmness under misfortune is not an attribute of either hen-folk
or womenkind, and while Mrs. Saunders declaimed over her onion bed such
portions of the slang dictionary as are permitted by the Nonconformist
conscience to be said or sung, the Vasco da Gama fowl was waking the
echoes of Toad-Water with crescendo bursts of throat music which
compelled attention to her griefs. Mrs. Crick had a long family, and was
therefore licensed, in the eyes of her world, to have a short temper, and
when some of her ubiquitous offspring had informed her, with the
authority of eye-witnesses, that her neighbour had so far forgotten
herself as to heave stones at her hen--her best hen, the best layer in
the countryside--her thoughts clothed themselves in language "unbecoming
to a Christian woman"--so at least said Mrs. Saunders, to whom most of
the language was applied. Nor was she, on her part, surprised at Mrs.
Crick's conduct in letting her hens stray into other body's gardens, and
then abusing of them, seeing as how she remembered things against Mrs.
Crick--and the latter simultaneously had recollections of lurking
episodes in the past of Susan Saunders that were nothing to her credit.
"Fond memory, when all things fade we fly to thee," and in the paling
light of an April afternoon the two women confronted each other from
their respective sides of the party wall, recalling with shuddering
breath the blots and blemishes of their neighbour's family record. There
was that aunt of Mrs. Crick's who had died a pauper in Exeter
workhouse--every one knew that Mrs. Saunders' uncle on her mother's side
drank himself to death--then there was that Bristol cousin of Mrs.
Crick's! From the shrill triumph with which his name was dragged in, his
crime must have been pilfering from a cathedral a