“Timotheus placed on high

    Among the tuneful choir,

    With flying fingers touched the lyre.”

    Dryden.

On the first of October the new beginning was to be made. The new curate, Mr Harford, arrived, and spent his first few days at Greenhow, while looking out for a lodging at Downhill, for he was to be shared between the two parishes as before, and Mr Atkins still undertook to assist on Sundays. Mr Harford looked very young, almost a boy, and was small and thin, but not in the least delicate. He had only worked off his superfluous flesh in study and parish cares at Oxford, and he was likely to do the same in his new home. He looked on it as likely to be his residence for a long time, for, as the President had already told Mrs Carbonel, he was engaged to a young lady, whose father would not consent to her marriage till he had a living worth 500 pounds a year, and there were a good many fellows senior to him.

He seemed to have no fears of any amount of work, and the first thing he thought of was how to arrange for Uphill to have two services on Sunday, as he thought could be contrived by giving the Downhill people, who mostly lived near the church, their second service in the evening instead of the morning; and, as Mr Atkins would thus have more to do, he gave up to that gentleman the addition to his stipend, which the President had offered to himself. The boon was great to the Greenhow family, who had often been hindered by weather from getting to Downhill. Moreover, he had plans for one service and sermon in the week, and for a cottage lecture at a distant hamlet.

Also, in the first fortnight of his stay, he had called at every house, alike in Downhill and Uphill, to the great surprise of some of the families, who had not in the memory of man seen a parson cross their threshold. Some did not like it, such as old Dame Verdon, who, though she could hardly get out of bed, was very sore about the new school; and when her friends came to see her, told them wonderful stories which she had picked up—or Lizzie had from some hawker—that the gentlefolks thought there were too many children for the rates and taxes, and they were going to get them all into the school, and make an end of them. Sometimes she said it was by “giving of them all the cowpox,” as Dame Spurrell called vaccination as the fashion was in those parts, sometimes it was by sending them all out to Botany Bay.

And as Mrs Carbonel had prevailed on the new gardener’s wife to have her baby vaccinated, and George Hewlett’s and Mrs Mole’s children had been thence treated by her own hands, this was believed the more, although none of the children were visibly the worse for it after the first few days; but some of the women, and almost all the children believed the story, and many of the little ones were in fits of terror about the school, so that there was a falling off even with the Sunday School. The new school was only an additional room to a good-sized cottage, with a couple of windows and a brick floor, fitted with forms without backs, but which had at least good firm legs to stand upon, pegs for the cloaks and head-gear round the walls, and a single desk, likely to be quite sufficient for the superior few who were to learn writing and summing. The stock, obtained from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, consisted of a dozen copies of Mrs Trimmer’s Abridgment of the Old Testament, the same number of the lady’s work on the New Testament, a packet of little paper books of the Sermon on the Mount, the Parables and the Miracles, and another packet of little books, where the alphabet led the way upwards from ba, bo, etcetera, to “Our cat can kill a rat; can she not?” Also the broken Catechism, and Sellon’s Abridgment of instruction on the Catechism. There were a housewife full of needles, some brass thimbles, and a roll of calico provided, and this was the apparatus with which most village schools would commence.

Mrs Thorpe arrived with her two little girls, the neatest of creatures, still wearing her weeds, as indeed widows engaged in any business used to do for life as a sort of protection. Under her crape borders showed the smoothest of hair, and her apron was spotlessly white. The two little girls were patterns, with short cut hair, spotted blue frocks and checkered pinafores in the week, lilac frocks on Sundays; white capes on that same day, and bonnets of coarse straw, tied down with green ribbon, over little bonnet caps with plain net frilling, the only attempt at luxury apparent in their dress. Their names were Jane and Mary, and they looked very pretty and demure, though there was a little mischief in Mary’s eyes. Nothing could look nicer or more promising in the eyes of the sisters when they took her to her cottage, nor could any one be better pleased than she to work under her own young ladies, and to have so peaceful a home for her little daughters. She was introduced to her future scholars on Sunday in the wash-house, and very shy and awkward did they look, nor were the numbers as large as usual.

Mr Harford came to open the school on Monday morning, and the ladies met him there. The room was in beautiful order, and presently the younger Moles, the George Hewletts, the Seddons, the Pucklechurch grandchildren, and about half-a-dozen more dropped in; but no one else appeared, and these stood handling their pennies and looking sheepish.............