sisted upon it as necessary that even Gentile
converts should abstain from things strangled and from blood, and they
had joined this prohibition with that of a vice about the abominable
nature of which there could be no question; it would be well therefore to
abstain in future and see whether any noteworthy spiritual result ensued.
She did abstain, and was certain that from the day of her resolve she had
felt stronger, purer in heart, and in all respects more spiritually
minded than she had ever felt hitherto. Theobald did not lay so much
stress on this as she did, but as she settled what he should have at
dinner she could take care that he got no strangled fowls; as for black
puddings, happily, he had seen them made when he was a boy, and had never
got over his aversion for them. She wished the matter were one of more
general observance than it was; this was just a case in which as Lady
Winchester she might have been able to do what as plain Mrs Pontifex it
was hopeless even to attempt.

And thus this worthy couple jogged on from month to month and from year
to year. The reader, if he has passed middle life and has a clerical
connection, will probably remember scores and scores of rectors and
rectors' wives who differed in no material respect from Theobald and
Christina. Speaking from a recollection and experience extending over
nearly eighty years from the time when I was myself a child in the
nursery of a vicarage, I should say I had drawn the better rather than
the worse side of the life of an English country parson of some fifty
years ago. I admit, however, that there are no such people to be found
nowadays. A more united or, on the whole, happier, couple could not have
been found in England. One grief only overshadowed the early years of
their married life: I mean the fact that no living children were born to
them.

CHAPTER XVII

In the course of time this sorrow was removed. At the beginning of the
fifth year of her married life Christina was safely delivered of a boy.
This was on the sixth of September 1835.

Word was immediately sent to old Mr Pontifex, who received the news with
real pleasure. His son John's wife had borne daughters only, and he was
seriously uneasy lest there should be a failure in the male line of his
descendants. The good news, therefore, was doubly welcome, and caused as
much delight at Elmhurst as dismay in Woburn Square, where the John
Pontifexes were then living.