Neither Francis nor any member of his family had ever been north of Bristol, and the north of England was to them a place where millionaires grew and factories ground out wealth and a set of ideas associated with the name of Richard Cobden, a Liberal of whom no Churchman could entirely approve. There was a bishop in our town, and he was a person of some celebrity. Also there were two churches which had a certain fame or notoriety for their extreme ritual. Welsh Nonconformists teemed in the town, and the Roman Catholics had a cathedral thirty years old.

Francis visited the place and stayed there two days, during which it rained except for half an hour just before he left. He refused to be depressed by the slums in which his church was situated—a black, stunted Gothic building with a ridiculous little steeple, and a sordid school next door to it—and told himself that it was just what he wanted. There was a fried-fish shop directly opposite the church, a dirty greengrocer’s shop next to that, and next again three public-houses. Another row of little shops followed on the other side of a bye-street, and for the rest, there were nothing but squat terraces of blackened red-brick cottages, two stories high, with blue slate roofs. In the street were an incredible number of children in curious nondescript garments, and some of them in rags. Many of the women wore clogs and all of them were sallow. The men were pale and ill-nourished and they walked slouchingly. The street was muddy and littered with refuse, and the air was thick and full of smells.

Francis stayed with the rector and met the caretaker of the school and church, the rector’s and the people’s wardens, and a few earnest men who examined him with hard, curious eyes. They asked after his family and how many children he had, and one of them whistled when he said he had eight. Francis wanted to like them, but he felt a stranger amongst them and could not be at his ease. They asked how he liked the church, and he told them very well, and the rector’s warden, Mr. Parsons, said: “Ah! you should see it at ’Arvest Festival.”

Their speech sounded uncouth and harsh after the soft drawl of his Cornish peasants, and it was this that Francis felt as the strongest barrier between them.

The living was worth three hundred and fifty pounds a year, and there were pew-rents, which would bring the stipend up to within a hundred pounds of the joint income of his two livings. Francis ignored that, and calculated that as he would have only one curate, the exchange would be equal, and no doubt his daughters would soon marry, and his sons would quickly earn their living in this money-making town. He was told that there were excellent schools for “them as could afford ’em,” and that settled the matter. Everything was as far as possible arranged and he returned to St. Withans, tussling with himself during the long journey and telling himself that he was not sorry to renounce his old life, and that at last he was going to enter upon work, real work.

He had arranged to take on the former rector’s old house in Fern Square (there was not so much as a blade of grass growing in it), and when Martha asked him about the town he concentrated on a description of the house in one of the largest and most imposing terraces in the district.

It was arranged that Frederic should finish his articles in Plymouth; and then, on a brilliant spring day, all the furniture, heirlooms, family portraits, and the valuable china inherited at intervals by Mrs. Folyat as her few aged relations one by one departed this life, having gone before, the Folyats set out at seven o’clock in the morning, and at half-past ten the same night reached our town where, at last, their history becomes interesting.

[IV
FERN SQUARE]

Sir,—I pray you take heed how you put a beast, tired with the heat of the sun and with long travel, among others, which, as I hear say, have divers maladies and diseases.
A PETTY THEFT.