of her eldest daughter, at which all Wrexby parish laughed as long as the joke could last.  There was laughter also when Mrs. Fleming’s second daughter received the name of ‘Rhoda;’ but it did not endure for so long a space, as it was known that she had taken more to the solitary and reflective reading of her Bible, and to thoughts upon flowers eternal.  Country people are not inclined to tolerate the display of a passion for anything.  They find it as intrusive and exasperating as is, in the midst of larger congregations, what we call genius.  For some years, Mrs. Fleming’s proceedings were simply a theme for gossips, and her vanity was openly pardoned, until that delusively prosperous appearance which her labour lent to the house, was worn through by the enforced confession of there being poverty in the household.  The ragged elbow was then projected in the face of Wrexby in a manner to preclude it from a sober appreciation of the fairness of the face.

Critically, moreover, her admission of great poppy-heads into her garden was objected to.  She would squander her care on poppies, and she had been heard to say that, while she lived, her children should be fully fed.  The encouragement of flaunting weeds in a decent garden was indicative of a moral twist that the expressed resolution to supply her table with plentiful nourishment, no matter whence it came, or how provided, sufficiently confirmed.  The reason with which she was stated to have fortified her stern resolve was of the irritating order, right in the abstract, and utterly unprincipled in the application.  She said, `Good bread, and good beef, and enough of both, make good blood; and my children shall be stout.’  This is such a thing as maybe announced by foreign princesses and rulers over serfs; but English Wrexby, in cogitative mood, demanded an equivalent for its beef and divers economies consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative woman.  Practically it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying her.  Though payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as lost ones by Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one main secret for mastering the custodians of credit.  She had a considerate remembrance and regard for the most distant of her debts, so that she seemed to be only always a little late, and exceptionally wrongheaded in theory.  Wrexby, therefore, acquiesced in helping to build up her children to stoutness, and but for the blindness of all people, save artists, poets, novelists, to the grandeur of their own creations, the inhabitants of this Kentish village might have had an enjoyable pride in the beauty and robust grace of the young girls,—­fair-haired, black-haired girls, a kindred contrast, like fire and smoke, to look upon.  In stature, in bearing, and in expression, they were, if I may adopt the eloquent modern manner of eulogy, strikingly above their class.  They carried erect shoulders, like creatures not ashamed of showing a