“The doctor gave a hand, and together they carried the light shell down through the gateway into the field, and left it in a corner. The driver turned his lantern on his helper’s face, and said briskly:
“‘Why, it’s Maister Smith, t’ yung doctor, for sewer?’
“Smith assented.
“‘Sithee,’ said the collier confidentially; ‘aw’ll tell tha wot aw’ll do’; and, coming closely to him, he said in an undertone, ‘Aw’ll sell tha t’owd un fer awf a crawn.’
“It was his father.”
Mrs. Miller shuddered. “If any one mentions Yorkshire again,” she declared, “I will talk about the Burials Bill (which seems much wanted in that county), and if the Canon is sconced, and drinks all that beer, he will have the gout, and I pity the Rural Deanery.”
Johnson chuckled with the satisfaction of a man who has hit the mark, and the conversation became general. The Archdeacon tried to interest our hostess in the Revised Version, but she did not know the aorist from the paulo-post-futurum. She skilfully played a spade, and introduced gardening: but he did not know a pelargonium from a potentilla. Then she led a small club, and brought in the Girls’ Friendly Society Annual Meeting, and he followed suit.
Some one mentioned the Bishop, and though not much could be said about the local Diocesan in the Archdeacon’s presence—for as you would not abuse a man’s eye to the owner, so you should not abuse the owner to the eye—yet it led to talk about bishops generally, and we became anecdotical, as we ate our gooseberry tart. At that date men told stories of S. Wilberforce, and Magee: Stubbs and Temple were not yet in all men’s mouths. Most of the stories were familiar, but we enjoyed them as old friends, and in the telling of them, and in the subsequent discussion, curious light was thrown on the gradual accretion and expansion to which such legends are subject. In the case of one well-known story we were able to trace the aboriginal myth:
“Bishop Magee was at a meeting of bishops, discussing the rubrical words ‘Before the table.’ He wrote on a bit of paper, and passed it to a colleague:
“‘Before the table’ means ‘at the north end of the table.’ Qu.: was ‘the piper that played before Moses’ standing at the north end of Moses?”