As indeed they were: there was but one road in Far Edgerley. This was called Edgerley Street, and all the grassy lanes that led to people's residences turned off from and came back to it, going nowhere else. There were advantages in this. Some persons had lately felt that they had not sufficiently appreciated this excellent plan for a town; for if any friend should happen to be out, paying a visit or taking the air, sooner or later, with a little patience, one could always meet her (or him); she (or he), without deliberate climbing of fences, not being able to escape.
The little company from the church now went down the church knoll towards this useful street. Far Edgerley was all knolls, almost every house having one of its own, and crowning it. The rector walked first, with Miss Corinna; the other ladies followed in a cluster which was graceful, but somewhat indefinite as to ranks, save where Mr. Phipps had determinedly placed himself beside Miss Lucy Rendlesham, and thus made one even rank of two. Ferdinand Kenneway walked by himself a little to the right of the band; he walked not with any one in particular, but as general escort for the whole. Ferdinand Kenneway often accompanied Far Edgerley ladies homeward in this collective way. It was considered especially safe.
Flower, the bell-ringer, left alone on the church steps, looked after their departing figures in the moonlight. "A riddler it is," he said to himself—"a riddler, and a myst'rous one, the way all womenkind feels itself drawed to parsons. I suppose they jedge anything proper that's clirrycal." He shook his head, locked the church door, and went across to close the study.
Flower was a Chillawassee philosopher who had formerly carried the mail on horseback over Lonely Mountain to Fox Gap. Age having dimmed somewhat his youthful fires, lessening thereby his interest in natural history, as exemplified by the bears, wolves, and catamounts that diversified his route, he had resigned his position, judging it to be "a little too woodsy," on the whole, for a man of his years. He then accepted the office of bell-ringer of St. John's, a place which he had been heard to say conferred a dignity second only to that of mails. He was very particular about this dignity, and the title of it. "Item," he said, "that I be not a sexton; for sexton be a slavish name for a free-born mountaineer. Bell-ringer Flower I be, and Bell-ringer Flower you may call me."
Now the bell of St. John's was but a small one, suspended rustically, under a little roof of thatch, from the branch of an old elm near the church door; to ring it, therefore, was but a slight task. But Flower made it a weighty one by his attitude and manner as he stood on Sunday mornings, rope in hand, hat off, and eyes devotionally closed, beside his leafy belfry, bringing out with majestic pull the one little silver note.
He now re-arranged the chairs in the study, and came upon a framed motto surrounded by rosebuds in worsted-work, a fresh contribution to the rector's walls from the second Miss Greer. "Talk about the mil'try—my! they're nothing to 'em—nothing to these unmarried reverints!" he said to himself, as he surveyed this new memento. He hung it on the wall, where there was already quite a frieze of charming embroidery in the way of texts and woollen flowers. "Item—however, very few of them is unmarried. Undoubted they be drove to it early, in self-defence."
CHAPTER II.
"YOU are a little tired, Major?"
"Possibly. Somewhat. Sara has been reading aloud to me from the Review. She read all the long articles."
"Ah—she does not know how that tires you. I must tell her. She does not appreciate—she is still so young, you know—that with your extensive reading, your knowledge of public affairs and the world at large, you can generally anticipate, after the first few sentences, all that can be said."