t least, but as both
remembrancers were speaking at once it was difficult to distinguish his
infamy from the scandal which beclouded the memory of Mrs. Saunders'
brother's wife's mother--who may have been a regicide, and was certainly
not a nice person as Mrs. Crick painted her. And then, with an air of
accumulating and irresistible conviction, each belligerent informed the
other that she was no lady--after which they withdrew in a great silence,
feeling that nothing further remained to be said. The chaffinches
clinked in the apple trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes,
and the waning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots, but
between the neighbour households had sprung up a barrier of hate,
permeating and permanent.

The male heads of the families were necessarily drawn into the quarrel,
and the children on either side were forbidden to have anything to do
with the unhallowed offspring of the other party. As they had to travel
a good three miles along the same road to school every day, this was
awkward, but such things have to be. Thus all communication between the
households was sundered. Except the cats. Much as Mrs. Saunders might
deplore it, rumour persistently pointed to the Crick he-cat as the
presumable father of sundry kittens of which the Saunders she-cat was
indisputably the mother. Mrs. Saunders drowned the kittens, but the
disgrace remained.

Summer succeeded spring, and winter summer, but the feud outlasted the
waning seasons. Once, indeed, it seemed as though the healing influences
of religion might restore to Toad-Water its erstwhile peace; the hostile
families found themselves side by side in the soul-kindling atmosphere of
a Revival Tea, where hymns were blended with a beverage that came of
tea-leaves and hot water and took after the latter parent, and where
ghostly counsel was tempered by garnishings of solidly fashioned
buns--and here, wrought up by the environment of festive piety, Mrs.
Saunders so far unbent as to remark guardedly to Mrs. Crick that the
evening had been a fine one. Mrs. Crick, under the influence of her
ninth cup of tea and her fourth hymn, ventured on the hope that it might
continue fine, but a maladroit allusion on the part of the Saunders good
man to the backwardness of garden crops brought the Feud stalking forth
from its corner with all its old bitterness. Mrs. Saunders joined
heartily in the singing of the final hymn, which told of peace