“Try one,” said the mother. “Johnny, hand them to Miss Timmens, and a plate.”
“That silly Sarah Trewin has gone and tumbled down,” cried Miss Timmens, as she thanked me and took the plate and one of the tartlets. “Went and slipped upon a slide near the school-house. What a delicious tart!”
“Sarah Trewin!” cried the mater, turning round from the board. “Why, she was here an hour ago. Has she hurt herself?”
“Just bruised all the one side of her black and blue, from her shoulder to her ankle,” answered Miss Timmens. “Those unruly boys have made slides all over the place, ma’am; and Sarah Trewin must needs go down upon one, not looking, I suppose, to her feet. She had only just turned out of the schoolroom with Nettie.”
“Dear, dear! And she is so unable to bear a fall!”
“Of course it might have been worse, for there are no bones broken,” remarked Miss Timmens. “As to Nettie, the child was nearly frightened out of her senses; she’s sobbing and crying still. Never was such a timid child as that.”
“Will Sarah Trewin be able to come this evening?”
“Not she, ma’am. She’ll be as stiff as buckram for days to come. I’d like to pay out those boys—making their slides on the pathway and endangering people’s lives! Nicol’s not half strict enough with them; and I’m tired of telling him so. Tiresome, rude monkeys! Not that my girls are a degree better: they’d go down all the slides in the parish, let ’em have their way. What with them, and what with these fantastical notions of the new parson, I’m sure my life’s a martyrdom.”
The mother smiled over her pastry. Miss Timmens and the parson, civilly polite to one another, were mentally at daggers drawn.
The time I am writing of was before the movement, set in of later years, for giving the masses the same kind of education as their betters; but our new parson at Crabb was before his age in these ideas. To experienced Miss Timmens, and to a great many more clear-sighted people, the best word that could be given to the movement was “fantastical.”