'Yonder, you go over the marsh by the hill with the windmill on it, and you come to a road, you'll find a blacksmith's shop, and you must ask there. He's the curate, there's no rector hereabouts. They keep away because of the ague.'
Mehalah cross the fen indicated, passed beside the windmill and the blacksmith's shop, and found the cottage occupied by the curate, a poor man, married to a woman of a low class, with a family of fourteen children, packed in the house wherever they could be stowed away. The curate was a crushed man, his ideas stunned in his head by the uproar in which he dwelt. His old scholarship remained to him in his brain like fossils in the chalk, to be picked ont, dead morsels. There was nothing living in the petrified white matter that filled his skull.
Mehalah knocked at the door. The parson opened it, and admitted her into his kitchen. As soon as the wife heard a female voice, she rushed out of the back kitchen with her arms covered with soap suds, and stood in the door. A little-minded woman, she lived on her jealousy, and would never allow her husband to speak with another woman if she could help it.
'What do you want, my dear?' asked the curate.
'Ahem!' coughed the wife. 'Dear, indeed! Pray who are you, miss?'
Mehalah explained that she sought work, and hoped that the parson would be able to recommend her.
'You don't, you don't——' faltered he.
'You don't suppose I'd take you on here,' said the parson's wife. 'You're too young by twenty years. I don't approve of young women; they don't make good servants. I like a staid matronly person of forty to fifty, that one can trust, and won't be gadding after boys or——' she shook her suds at her husband. 'But I don't at present want any servant. We are full.'
'We don't keep any,' said the pastor.
'Edward! don't demean us, we do keep servants—occasionally. You know we do, Edward. Mrs. Cutts comes in to scour out and clean up of a Saturday. You forget that. We pay her ninepence.'