“Ask for Old Rogers, sir,” said the man.  “Everybody knows Old Rogers.  But if your reverence minds what my wife says, you won’t go wrong.  When you find the river, it takes you to the mill; and when you find the mill, you find the wheel; and when you find the wheel, you haven’t far to look for the cottage, sir.  It’s a poor place, but you’ll be welcome, sir.”

CHAPTER III.

My first Monday at marshmallows.

The next day I might expect some visitors.  It is a fortunate thing that English society now regards the parson as a gentleman, else he would have little chance of being useful to the upper classes.  But I wanted to get a good start of them, and see some of my poor before my rich came to see me.  So after breakfast, on as lovely a Monday in the beginning of autumn as ever came to comfort a clergyman in the reaction of his efforts to feed his flock on the Sunday, I walked out, and took my way to the village.  I strove to dismiss from my mind every feeling of doing duty, of performing my part, and all that.  I had a horror of becoming a moral policeman as much as of “doing church.”  I would simply enjoy the privilege, more open to me in virtue of my office, of ministering.  But as no servant has a right to force his service, so I would be the neighbour only, until such time as the opportunity of being the servant should show itself.

The village was as irregular as a village should be, partly consisting of those white houses with intersecting parallelograms of black which still abound in some regions of our island.  Just in the centre, however, grouping about an old house of red brick, which had once been a manorial residence, but was now subdivided in all modes that analytic ingenuity could devise, rose a portion of it which, from one point of view, might seem part of an old town.  But you had only to pass round any one of three visible corners to see stacks of wheat and a farm-yard; while in another direction the houses went straggling away into a wood that looked very like the beginning of a forest, of which some of the village orchards appeared to form part.  From the street the slow-winding, poplar-bordered stream was here and there just visible.

I did not quite like to have it between me and my village.  I could not help preferring that homely relation in which the houses are built up like swallow-nests on to the very walls of the cathedrals themselves, to the arrangement here, where the river flowed, with what flow there was in it, between the church and the people.

A little way beyond the farther end of the village appeared an iron gate, of considerable size, dividing a lofty stone wall.  And upon the top of that one of the stone pillars supporting the gate which I could see, stood a creature of stone, whether natant, volant, passant, couchant, or rampant, I could not tell, only it looked like something terrible enough for a quite antediluvian heraldry.