Scenes of Clerical Life | Page 4

when a man could
hold three small livings, starve a curate a-piece on two of them, and
live badly himself on the third. It was so with the Vicar of Shepperton;
a vicar given to bricks and mortar, and thereby running into debt far
away in a northern county--who executed his vicarial functions towards
Shepperton by pocketing the sum of thirty-five pounds ten per annum,
the net surplus remaining to him from the proceeds of that living, after
the disbursement of eighty pounds as the annual stipend of his curate.
And now, pray, can you solve me the following problem? Given a man

with a wife and six children: let him be obliged always to exhibit
himself when outside his own door in a suit of black broadcloth, such
as will not undermine the foundations of the Establishment by a paltry
plebeian glossiness or an unseemly whiteness at the edges; in a snowy
cravat, which is a serious investment of labour in the hemming,
starching, and ironing departments; and in a hat which shows no
symptom of taking to the hideous doctrine of expediency, and shaping
itself according to circumstances; let him have a parish large enough to
create an external necessity for abundant shoe-leather, and an internal
necessity for abundant beef and mutton, as well as poor enough to
require frequent priestly consolation in the shape of shillings and
sixpences; and, lastly, let him be compelled, by his own pride and other
people's, to dress his wife and children with gentility from
bonnet-strings to shoe-strings. By what process of division can the sum
of eighty pounds per annum be made to yield a quotient which will
cover that man's weekly expenses? This was the problem presented by
the position of the Rev. Amos Barton, as curate of Shepperton, rather
more than twenty years ago.
What was thought of this problem, and of the man who had to work it
out, by some of the well-to-do inhabitants of Shepperton, two years or
more after Mr. Barton's arrival among them, you shall hear, if you will
accompany me to Cross Farm, and to the fireside of Mrs. Patten, a
childless old lady, who had got rich chiefly by the negative process of
spending nothing. Mrs. Patten's passive accumulation of wealth,
through all sorts of 'bad times', on the farm of which she had been sole
tenant since her husband's death, her epigrammatic neighbour, Mrs.
Hackit, sarcastically accounted for by supposing that 'sixpences grew
on the bents of Cross Farm;' while Mr. Hackit, expressing his views
more literally, reminded his wife that 'money breeds money'. Mr. and
Mrs. Hackit, from the neighbouring farm, are Mrs. Patten's guests this
evening; so is Mr. Pilgrim, the doctor from the nearest market-town,
who, though occasionally affecting aristocratic airs, and giving late
dinners with enigmatic side-dishes and poisonous port, is never so
comfortable as when he is relaxing his professional legs in one of those
excellent farmhouses where the mice are sleek and the mistress sickly.
And he is at this moment in clover.

For the flickering of Mrs. Patten's bright fire is reflected in her bright
copper tea-kettle, the home-made muffins glisten with an inviting
succulence, and Mrs. Patten's niece, a single lady of fifty, who has
refused the most ineligible offers out of devotion to her aged aunt, is
pouring the rich cream into the fragrant tea with a discreet liberality.
Reader! did you ever taste such a cup of tea as Miss Gibbs is this
moment handing to Mr. Pilgrim? Do you know the dulcet strength, the
animating blandness of tea sufficiently blended with real farmhouse
cream? No--most likely you are a miserable town-bred reader, who
think of cream as a thinnish white fluid, delivered in infinitesimal
pennyworths down area steps; or perhaps, from a presentiment of
calves' brains, you refrain from any lacteal addition, and rasp your
tongue with unmitigated bohea. You have a vague idea of a milch cow
as probably a white-plaster animal standing in a butterman's window,
and you know nothing of the sweet history of genuine cream, such as
Miss Gibbs's: how it was this morning in the udders of the large sleek
beasts, as they stood lowing a patient entreaty under the milking-shed;
how it fell with a pleasant rhythm into Betty's pail, sending a delicious
incense into the cool air; how it was carried into that temple of moist
cleanliness, the dairy, where it quietly separated itself from the meaner
elements of milk, and lay in mellowed whiteness, ready for the
skimming-dish which transferred it to Miss Gibbs's glass cream-jug. If
I am right in my conjecture, you are unacquainted with the highest
possibilities of tea; and Mr. Pilgrim, who is holding that cup in his
hands, has an idea beyond you.
Mrs. Hackit declines cream; she has