the villages round, she never would join the church as a member.  She never agreed with the minister, and he never could make anything out of her.  They did not quarrel, but she thought nothing of his sermons, and he was perplexed and uncomfortable in the presence of a nondescript who did not respond to any dogmatic statement of the articles of religion, and who yet could not be put aside as “one of those in the gallery”—­that is to say, as one of the ordinary unconverted, for she used to quote hymns with amazing fervour, and she quoted them to him with a freedom and a certain superiority which he might have expected from an aged brother minister, but certainly not from one of his own congregation.  He was a preacher of the Gospel, it was true; and it was his duty, a duty on which he insisted, to be “instant in season and out of season” in saying spiritual things to his flock; but then they were things proper, decent, conventional, uttered with gravity at suitable times--such as were customary amongst all the ministers of the denomination.  It was not pleasant to be outbid in his own department, especially by one who was not a communicant, and to be obliged, when he went on a pastoral visit to a house in which Mrs. Butts happened to be, to sit still and hear her, regardless of the minister’s presence, conclude a short mystical monologue with Cowper’s verse —

“Exults our rising soul,
   Disburdened of her load,
And swells unutterably full
   Of glory and of God.”

This was not pleasant to our minister, nor was it pleasant to the minister’s wife.  But George Butts held a responsible position in our community, and the minister’s wife held also a responsible position, so that she taxed all her ingenuity to let her friends understand at tea-parties what she thought of Mrs. Butts without saying anything which could be the ground of formal remonstrance.  Thus did Mrs. Butts live among us, as an Arabian bird with its peculiar habits, cries, and plumage might live in one of our barn-yards with the ordinary barn-door fowls.

I was never happier when I was a boy than when I was with Mrs. Butts at the mill, which George had inherited.  There was a grand freedom in her house.  The front door leading into the garden was always open.  There was no precise separation between the house and the mill.  The business and the dwelling-place were mixed up together, and covered with flour.  Mr. Butts was in the habit of walking out of his mill into the living-room every now and then, and never dreamed when one o’clock came that it was necessary for him to change his floury coat before he had his dinner.  His cap he also often retained, and in any weather, not extraordinarily cold, he sat in his shirtsleeves.  The garden was large and half-wild.  A man from the mill, if work was slack, gave a day to it now and then, but it was not trimmed and raked and combed like the other gardens in the town.  It was full of gooseberry trees, and I was permitted