Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 05

Produced by Dagny; and by David Widger
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FOOLS blind to truth; nor know their erring soul How much the half is better than the whole. —HESIOD: Op. et Dies , 40.
Do as the Heavens have done; forget your evil; With them, forgive yourself.— The Winter's Tale .
. . . The sweet'st companion that e'er man Bred his hopes out of.— Ibid.
THE curate of Brook-Green was sitting outside his door. The vicarage which he inhabited was a straggling, irregular, but picturesque building,—humble enough to suit the means of the curate, yet large enough to accommodate the vicar. It had been built in an age when the indigentes et pauperes for whom universities were founded supplied, more than they do now, the fountains of the Christian ministry, when pastor and flock were more on an equality.
From under a rude and arched porch, with an oaken settle on either side for the poor visitor, the door opened at once upon the old-fashioned parlour,—a homely but pleasant room, with one wide but low cottage casement, beneath which stood the dark shining table that supported the large Bible in its green baize cover; the Concordance, and the last Sunday's sermon, in its jetty case. There by the fireplace stood the bachelor's round elbow-chair, with a needlework cushion at the back; a walnut-tree bureau, another table or two, half a dozen plain chairs, constituted the rest of the furniture, saving some two or three hundred volumes, ranged in neat shelves on the clean wainscoted walls. There was another room, to which you ascended by two steps, communicating with this parlour, smaller but finer, and inhabited only on festive days, when Lady Vargrave, or some other quiet neighbour, came to drink tea with the good curate.
An old housekeeper and her grandson—a young fellow of about two and twenty, who tended the garden, milked the cow, and did in fact what he was wanted to do—composed the establishment of the humble minister.