There was one exception to my unwillingness to join in the pastoral labours of Mary Grace.  When she announced, on a fine afternoon, that we were going to Pavor and Barton, I was always agog to start.  These were two hamlets in our parish, and, I should suppose, the original home of its population.  Pavor was, even then, decayed almost to extinction, but Barton preserved its desultory street of ancient, detached cottages.  Each, however poor, had a wild garden around it, and, where the inhabitants possessed some pride in their surroundings, the roses and the jasmines and that distinguished creeper,—­which one sees nowhere at its best but in Devonshire cottage-gardens,—­the stately cotoneaster, made the whole place a bower.  Barton was in vivid contrast to our own harsh, open, squalid village, with its mean modern houses, its absence of all vegetation.  The ancient thatched cottages of Barton were shut in by moist hills, and canopied by ancient trees; they were approached along a deep lane which was all a wonder and a revelation to me that spring, since, in the very words of Shelley: 

  There in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
    Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured may,
  And cherry blossoms, and white cups, whose wine
    Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day;
  And wild roses, and ivy serpentine
    With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray.

Around and beyond Barton there lay fairyland.  All was mysterious, unexplored, rich with infinite possibilities.  I should one day enter it, the sword of make-believe in my hand, the cap of courage on my head, ‘when you are a big boy’, said the oracle of Mary Grace.  For the present, we had to content ourselves with being an unadventurous couple—­a little woman, bent half-double, and a preternaturally sedate small boy—­as we walked very slowly, side by side, conversing on terms of high familiarity, in which Biblical and colloquial phrases were quaintly jumbled, through the sticky red mud of the Pavor lanes with Barton as a bourne before us.

When we came home, my Father would sometimes ask me for particulars.  Where had we been, whom had we found at home, what testimony had those visited been able to give of the Lord’s goodness to them, what had Mary Grace replied in the way of exhortation, reproof or condolence?  These questions I hated at the time, but they were very useful to me, since they gave me the habit of concentrating my attention on what was going on in the course of our visits, in case I might be called upon to give a report.  My Father was very kind in the matter; he cultivated my powers of expression, he did not snub me when I failed to be intelligent.  But I overheard Miss Marks and Mary Grace discussing the whole question under the guise of referring to ’you know whom, not a hundred miles hence’, fancying that I could not recognize their little ostrich because its head was in a bag of metaphor.  I understood perfectly, and gathered that they both of them thought this business of my going into undrained cottages injudicious.  Accordingly, I was by degrees taken ‘visiting’ only when Mary Grace was going into the country-hamlets, and then I was usually left outside, to skip among the flowers and stalk the butterflies.