notions of what was proper; but, as Mrs. Higgins observed in an undertone to Mrs. Parrot when they were coming out of church, ’Her husband, who’d been born i’ the parish, might ha’ told her better.’  An unreadiness to put on black on all available occasions, or too great an alacrity in putting it off, argued, in Mrs. Higgins’s opinion, a dangerous levity of character, and an unnatural insensibility to the essential fitness of things.

‘Some folks can’t a-bear to put off their colours,’ she remarked; ’but that was never the way i’ my family.  Why, Mrs. Parrot, from the time I was married, till Mr. Higgins died, nine years ago come Candlemas, I niver was out o’ black two year together!’

‘Ah,’ said Mrs. Parrot, who was conscious of inferiority in this respect, ’there isn’t many families as have had so many deaths as yours, Mrs. Higgins.’

Mrs. Higgins, who was an elderly widow, ‘well left’, reflected with complacency that Mrs. Parrot’s observation was no more than just, and that Mrs. Jennings very likely belonged to a family which had had no funerals to speak of.

Even dirty Dame Fripp, who was a very rare church-goer, had been to Mrs. Hackit to beg a bit of old crape, and with this sign of grief pinned on her little coal-scuttle bonnet, was seen dropping her curtsy opposite the reading-desk.  This manifestation of respect towards Mr. Gilfil’s memory on the part of Dame Fripp had no theological bearing whatever.  It was due to an event which had occurred some years back, and which, I am sorry to say, had left that grimy old lady as indifferent to the means of grace as ever.  Dame Fripp kept leeches, and was understood to have such remarkable influence over those wilful animals in inducing them to bite under the most unpromising circumstances, that though her own leeches were usually rejected, from a suspicion that they had lost their appetite, she herself was constantly called in to apply the more lively individuals furnished from Mr. Pilgrim’s surgery, when, as was very often the case, one of that clever man’s paying patients was attacked with inflammation.  Thus Dame Fripp, in addition to ‘property’ supposed to yield her no less than half-a-crown a-week, was in the receipt of professional fees, the gross amount of which was vaguely estimated by her neighbours as ‘pouns an’ pouns’.  Moreover, she drove a brisk trade in lollipop with epicurean urchins, who recklessly purchased that luxury at the rate of two hundred per cent.  Nevertheless, with all these notorious sources of income, the shameless old woman constantly pleaded poverty, and begged for scraps at Mrs. Hackit’s, who, though she always said Mrs. Fripp was ’as false as two folks’, and no better than a miser and a heathen, had yet a leaning towards her as an old neighbour.

’There’s that case-hardened old Judy a-coming after the tea-leaves again,’ Mrs. Hackit would say; ‘an’ I’m fool enough to give ’em her, though Sally wants ’em all the while to sweep the floors with!’