Mrs. Hackit declines cream; she has so long abstained from it with an eye to the weekly butter-money, that abstinence, wedded to habit, has begotten aversion.  She is a thin woman with a chronic liver-complaint, which would have secured her Mr. Pilgrim’s entire regard and unreserved good word, even if he had not been in awe of her tongue, which was as sharp as his own lancet.  She has brought her knitting—­no frivolous fancy knitting, but a substantial woollen stocking; the click-click of her knitting-needles is the running accompaniment to all her conversation, and in her utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend’s self-satisfaction, she was never known to spoil a stocking.  Mrs. Patten does not admire this excessive click-clicking activity.  Quiescence in an easy-chair, under the sense of compound interest perpetually accumulating, has long seemed an ample function to her, and she does her malevolence gently.  She is a pretty little old woman of eighty, with a close cap and tiny flat white curls round her face, as natty and unsoiled and invariable as the waxen image of a little old lady under a glass-case; once a lady’s-maid, and married for her beauty.  She used to adore her husband, and now she adores her money, cherishing a quiet blood-relation’s hatred for her niece, Janet Gibbs, who, she knows, expects a large legacy, and whom she is determined to disappoint.  Her money shall all go in a lump to a distant relation of her husband’s, and Janet shall be saved the trouble of pretending to cry, by finding that she is left with a miserable pittance.

Mrs. Patten has more respect for her neighbour Mr. Hackit than for most people.  Mr. Hackit is a shrewd substantial man, whose advice about crops is always worth listening to, and who is too well off to want to borrow money.

And now that we are snug and warm with this little tea-party, while it is freezing with February bitterness outside, we will listen to what they are talking about.

‘So,’ said Mr. Pilgrim, with his mouth only half empty of muffin, ’you had a row in Shepperton Church last Sunday.  I was at Jim Hood’s, the bassoon-man’s, this morning, attending his wife, and he swears he’ll be revenged on the parson—­a confounded, methodistical, meddlesome chap, who must be putting his finger in every pie.  What was it all about?’

‘O, a passill o’ nonsense,’ said Mr. Hackit, sticking one thumb between the buttons of his capacious waistcoat, and retaining a pinch of snuff with the other—­for he was but moderately given to ’the cups that cheer but not inebriate’, and had already finished his tea; ’they began to sing the wedding psalm for a new-married couple, as pretty a psalm an’ as pretty a tune as any in the prayer-book.  It’s been sung for every new-married couple since I was a boy.  And what can be better?’ Here Mr. Hackit stretched out his left arm, threw back his head, and broke into melody—­

     ’O what a happy thing it is,
     And joyful for to see,
     Brethren to dwell together in
     Friendship and unity.