‘Going to meeting, I suppose,’ said the parson.
‘What, are meetings allowed on the estate?’
‘Unfortunately, they are. My brother’s grounds only come up to the village, and the people there do as they like. But it is getting late. Let us have a trot.’ Unfortunately, as the horsemen broke into a trot, they ran right into a group of poor people on their way to meeting. Unfortunately, a poor old woman was caught by one of the horses and thrown down.
‘Are you much hurt?’ said a young man, running to her rescue.
‘No, Mr. Wentworth,’ said one of the group. ‘Mother, I believe, is more frightened than hurt. We would have had her stop at home, but she said she must come and hear you preach. She said she was here when your father came to preach for the first time, and we could not keep her at home.’
‘And who are the men on horseback?’ who by this time were far away.
‘Why, one of ’em, the young one, is Sir Watkin Strahan, with his uncle, the parson of the next parish.’
‘Well, for a young man, he was by no means pleasant-looking. At any rate, he might have stopped to see if he had done any harm. But these rich men are all hard. Poor people have but one duty—to get out of their way, and to take their hats off to them when they meet!’
The expression of the young man was not to be taken literally. Farmer and peasant alike never took off the hat to anyone. The peasant simply made an obeisance and put up his hand to pull a lock of his front hair in proof of his deference to the ruling powers.
The crowd still clustered round the old woman, who was happily more frightened than hurt. She was one of a class rarely to be met with in our villages now, but at one time very common. She was a ‘meetinger.’ In some way she was a sufferer for the fact. When Christmas came there were coals and blankets at the Hall for such of the villagers as attended the parish church, but the ‘meetingers’ were left out in the cold; and yet they were the salt of the place—steady, orderly, industrious—content with their lot, however humble and hard. At the meeting they were all equals, brothers and sisters in Christ, believing that life was a scene of sorrow and difficulty, of darkness and poverty and death—believing also that that sorrow and pain would pass away, that that darkness would be turned into light, that the tear would be wiped from every eye, and the riches of heaven would be theirs in exchange for the poverty of earth, that death should be swallowed up in life. They studied one book, and that was the Bible. Their talk was in Scripture phrase, and it was not cant with them, but the utterance of a living faith. That faith exists no longer, but while it lasted it filled the peasant’s heart with a joy that the world could neither give nor take away, and there was peace and content in the home. There was no day like the Sunday, no treat like that of singing the songs of Zion, or of listening to the Gospel, as they held the sermon to be. Nowadays our villagers prefer to smoke a pipe and read the newspaper, and to talk of their rights. Then they were of the same way of thinking as the citizens of a small German duchy, who, when the year of revolution came across Europe, and the Grand-Duke gave them a representative government, were much annoyed at the trouble thus imposed on them, when he, the Grand-Duke, was born and endowed to do all the ruling himself.