“Disgusted with sport in that part of the country, I returned to Brest the same day, and there, timidly and with many precautions, I tried to find out something about the little old man....

“‘Oh, I know!’ somebody replied at last to my question; ’you are speaking of the manor-house at Hervenidozse, where the old countess lives, who dresses like a man and sleeps with her coachman.’

“And with a deep sigh of relief, and much to the astonishment of my informant, I replied: 

“‘Oh! so much the better!’”

JEROBOAM

Anyone who said, or even insinuated, that the Reverend William Greenfield, Vicar of St. Sampson’s, Tottenham, did not make his wife Anna perfectly happy, would certainly have been very malicious.  In their twelve years of married life, he had honored her with twelve children, and could anybody decently ask anything more of a saintly man?

Saintly to heroism in truth!  For his wife Anna, who was endowed with invaluable virtues, which made her a model among wives and a paragon among mothers, had not been equally endowed physically, for, in one word, she was hideous.  Her hair, which was coarse though it was thin, was the color of the national half-and-half, but of thick half-and-half which looked as if it had been already swallowed several times, and her complexion, which was muddy and pimply, looked as if it were covered with sand mixed with brickdust.  Her teeth, which were long and protruding, seemed as if they were about to start out of their sockets in order to escape from that mouth with scarcely any lips, whose sulphurous breath had turned them yellow.  They were evidently suffering from bile.

Her china-blue eyes looked vaguely, one very much to the right and the other very much to the left, with a divergent and frightened squint; no doubt in order that they might not see her nose, of which they felt ashamed.  And they were quite right!  Thin, soft, long, pendant, sallow, and ending in a violet knob, it irresistibly reminded those who saw it of something which cannot be mentioned except in a medical treatise.  Her body, through the inconceivable irony of nature, was at the same time thin and flabby, wooden and chubby, without having either the elegance of slimness or the rounded gracefulness of stoutness.  It might have been taken for a body which had formerly been adipose, but which had now grown thin, while the covering had remained floating on the framework.

She was evidently nothing but skin and bones, but then she had too many bones and too little skin.

It will be seen that the reverend gentleman had done his duty, his whole duty, more than his duty, in sacrificing a dozen times on this altar.  Yes, a dozen times bravely and loyally!  A dozen times, and his wife could not deny it nor dispute the number, because the children were there to prove it.  A dozen times, and not one less!