LETTER XXVI.

Oh, wings of the morning, here you come!  I have been looking out for you ever since post came.  Roberts is carrying orders into town, and will bring you this with a touch of the hat and an amused grin under it.  I saw you right on the top Sallis Hill:  this is to wager that my eyes have told me correctly.  Look out for me from far away, I am at my corner window:  wave to me!  Dearest, this is to kiss you before I can.

LETTER XXVII.

Dearest:  I have made a bad beginning of the week:  I wonder how it will end? it all comes of my not seeing enough of you.  Time hangs heavy on my hands, and the Devil finds me the mischief!

I prevailed upon myself to go on Sunday and listen to our new lately appointed vicar:  for I thought it not fair to condemn him on the strength of Mrs. P——­’s terrible reporting powers and her sensuous worship of his full-blown flowers of speech—­“pulpit-pot-plants” is what I call them.

It was not worse and not otherwise than I had expected.  I find there are only two kinds of clerics as generally necessary to salvation in a country parish—­one leads his parishioners to the altar and the other to the pulpit:  and the latter is vastly the more popular among the articulate and gad-about members of his flock.  This one sways himself over the edge of his frame, making signals of distress in all directions, and with that and his windy flights of oratory suggests twenty minutes in a balloon-car, till he comes down to earth at the finish with the Doxology for a parachute.  His shepherd’s crook is one long note of interrogation, with which he tries to hook down the heavens to the understanding of his hearers, and his hearers up to an understanding of himself.  All his arguments are put interrogatively, and few of them are worth answering.  Well, well, I shall be all the freer for your visit when you come next Sunday, and any Sunday after that you will:  and he shall come in to tea if you like and talk to you in quite a cultured and agreeable manner, as he can when his favorite beverage is before him.

I discover that I get “the snaps” on a Monday morning, if I get them at all.  The M.-A. gets them on the Sunday itself, softly but regularly:  they distress no one, and we all know the cause:  her fingers are itching for the knitting which she mayn’t do.  Your Protestant ignores Lent as a Popish device, a fond thing vainly invented:  but spreads it instead over fifty-two days in the year.  Why, I want to know, cannot I change the subject?

Sunday we get no post (and no collection except in church) unless we send down to the town for it, so Monday is all the more welcome:  but this I have been up and writing before it arrives—­therefore the “snaps.”

Our postman is a lovely sight.  I watched him walking up the drive the other morning, and he seemed quite perfection, for I guessed he was bringing me the thing which would make me happy all day.  I only hope the Government pays him properly.