On the north side of the church, near the monument of the murdered sailor, was a tiny mound, ever adorned with flowers, or when flowers were unattainable, with sprigs of holly and butcher's broom set with scarlet berries. At the beginning of the present century the decoration of a grave was rarely if ever practised. It was looked on as so strange in Mehetabel, and it served to foster the notion that she was not quite right in her head.
But in nothing else did the village schoolmistress show strangeness: in school and out of school she was beloved by her children, and their love was returned by her.
We live in a new age—one removed from that of Dame schools. A few years has transformed the system of education in the land.
In one of the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, he reached the island of Lagado, where the system of construction adopted by the natives in the erection of an edifice was to begin at the top, the apex of a spire or roof, and to build downwards, laying the foundations last of all, or leaving them out altogether.
This is precisely the system of primary education adopted in our land, and if rent and ruin result, it is possibly due to the method being an injudicious one.
The face of Mehetabel acquired a sweetness and repose that were new to it, and were superadded to her natural beauty. And she was happy, happy in the children she taught, happy in the method she pursued, and happy in the results.
Often did she recall that visit to Thor's Stone on the night when her child died, and she remembered her look up into the evening sky. "I thought all light was gone from me, when my star, my little feeble star, was eclipsed, but instead there spread over the sky a great shining, glorious canopy of rosy light, and it is so,"—she looked after her dispersing school—"my light and life and joy are there."
The Vicar came up.
There had been a great change in the ecclesiastical arrangements of Thursley. It was no longer served occasionally and fitfully from the mother church. It had a parson of its own. Moreover a change had been effected in the church. It was no longer as a house left desolate.
"I have been thinking, Mrs. Kink," said the Vicar, "that I should much like to know your system of education. I hear from all quarters such good accounts of your children."