Produced by David Widger AUNT RACHEL By David Christie Murray Author Of “First Person Singular” “Rainbow Gold” Etc. 1880 PREFACE. A critic, otherwise almost altogether friendly, protests, in reviewing a recent book of mine, that no rustics ever would, could, or will talk in real life as the rustics in that work are made to talk by me. Since this criticism might apply still more pointedly, if it were true, to “Aunt Rachel” than to “Rainbow Gold,” I desire to say a word or two in self-defence. A little, a very little, of the average rustic would go a long way in fiction. But I do not profess to deal with the average rustic. I deal, and love to deal, with the rustic exceptional, the village notable and wiseacre. Observant readers will have noticed that the date of one story is 1853, and that the epoch of the other is remoter by a dozen years. In my boyhood, in the Staffordshire Black Country, the rustic people were saturated with the speech of the Bible, the Church Service, and the “Pilgrim's Progress.” It is otherwise to-day, and their English, when it pretends at all to a literary flavor, is the English of the local weekly paper. The gravity, the slow sententiousness, and purposed wisdom of the utterances of more than one or two knots of habitual companions whom I can recall, were outside the chances of exaggeration. Often these people were really wise and witty. They were the makers of the local proverbial philosophy, and many of their phrases are alive today. I recall and could set down here a score of the quaintest bits of humor and good-sense, and one or two things genuinely poetical, which were spoken in my childish hearing. But I refrain myself easily from this temptation, because I have not written my last Black Country story, and prefer to put these things in a form as near their own as I can achieve. I only desire to say that I have _not_ exaggerated, but have fallen short of the characteristics I have had to deal with. D. Christie Murray. Rochefort, Belgium, December, 1885. AUNT RACHEL. A Rustic Sentimental Comedy. CHAPTER I. A quartette party--three violins and a 'cello--sat in summer evening weather in a garden. This garden was full of bloom and odor, and was shut in by high walls of ripe old brick. Here and there were large-sized plaster casts--Venus, Minerva, Mercury, a goat-hoofed Pan with his pipes, a Silence with a finger at her lips. They were all sylvan green and crumbled with exposure to the weather, so that, in spite of cheapness, they gave the place a certain Old-world and stately aspect to an observer who was disposed to think so and did not care to look at them too curiously. A square deal table with bare top and painted legs was set on the grass-plot beneath a gnarled apple-tree whose branches were thick with green fruit, and the quartette party sat about this table, each player with his music spread out before him on a portable little folding stand.