Frank Barrett.
Winklehaven was once a very bad place. Roads, trade, drainage—everything was as bad as it could be. The fishermen were bad, and beat their wives, and their wives were bad and deserved all the beating they got, and more. The fish caught there was bad before it went to market. The very parson was bad, and preached the excisemen to sleep whilst Red Robert and Black Bill ran their cargo of smuggled bad brandy.
Families who should have been respectable were not. Parents whipped their children into rebellion and then cut them off with shillings—bad ones, of course. Wards defied their guardians, and invariably fell in love contrary to the arrangements of their seniors. All the young men ran away with all the eligible young women.
The natural result was that after a dozen years from the time when Winklehaven stood at its worst, the population of the town consisted of infirm old people suffering from remorse, gout, and other afflictions proceeding from the excesses of youth, and such spinsters as were rejected by the young rakes of the preceding era. The moral aspect of the place changed in those years; it was no longer unholy, but, indeed, the most virtuous of human settlements.
The fishermen were too old and weak to beat their wives, and their failing memories could supply them with no oaths suitable to express their feelings. The wicked parson and the smugglers were no more; there wasn't a young man in the place, and the ladies who called themselves young were irreproachable.
It might strike the unthinking as an extraordinary peculiarity that a place so very, very good should require a curate in addition to a deaf rector. Nevertheless such was the case—a curate was wanted, and wanted very much by the congregation of St. Tickleimpit's—the unblemished spinsters, who called themselves young. They would have a curate, and Mr. Lillywhite Lambe, B.A., they had.
Now as the snow falls like a veil of purity over the face of the earth, only to melt and besmirch it before the lasting season of blossoming sweetness, so Mr. Lillywhite Lambe, B.A., came to Winklehaven and passed away before it attained to its present buttercup-and-daisy condition of virtue; and the manner of his going this pen shall tell.
Mr. Lillywhite Lambe, B.A., was a curate of the deepest dye. He had not so much principle as a bankrupt, and he came to Winklehaven with the settled purpose of marrying the richest and least objectionable of his congregation. The difficulties in his way were few. In personal appearance and demeanour he was so simple and sweet that even the rector was mistaken and thought him a fool, and what more could a girl of five-and-forty desire?
It was not a question which he could marry from amongst the eighteen or twenty tempting creatures around him, but rather which he should reject. They surrounded him like a glory wherever he went, waiting for him at his coming out and never leaving him until his going in. Seldom less than half-a-dozen spinsters accompanied him; they liked him too much and each other too little to trust him with one alone. And they wrote letters to him marked "private," containing the burning thoughts they dared not express in the presence of their sisters. Each was tantamount to an offer of marriage; but he was yet undecided in his selection, and replied to all with touching yet ambiguous texts. At this time he suffered somewhat from bile, for his most active exercise was wool-winding, and the ladies buttered his toast on both sides and the edges.
But anon there came a man with a black beard and a devil-may-care aspect to Winklehaven, and took for six months the cottage on the deserted West Cliff, which had belonged to Black Bill in the bad old times.