The weavers of Wadsworth and beyond have a sort of thwarted sense of the droll, and first they smiled sourly, and then guffawed, as the full humour of the parson’s coming broke on them. They chuckled at the looms that had been the cause of the knock-knocking, caught their fellows’ eyes in the steep street and roared again. For Pim o’ Cuddy’s pigeons knew their way home through the broken louver-boards of the squat belfry by this. If sometimes a ferret refused to come out of the air-hole by the buttress into which he had been put (and the church “lifted,” as they said, with rats), well, it was cheaper to take up a floorboard or two than to pull the church down. As for the unhinged church-door, it was a wit from Booth, over the moors far beyond the mountainous Scout, who observed that doorways were made to let folk into church and not to keep them out; and for the rest--the broken windows, the hen-coops in the aisle, the parchments taken by the lads to make kites, and the single elm of the churchyard that had been cut down to furnish galley-baulks for the looms of they knew whom--the responsibility for these things rested somewhere between Pim o’ Cuddy and the bishop of the diocese. On the first Sunday morning of his incumbency, save for a preliminary scrubbing and cleaning and moving out of the hen-coops and so forth, the parson preached in the church as it was; and then, at his own cost, he set half a dozen men to work. He paid them at the end of the week in good coin from a canvas bag. Thereupon a ripple of excitement passed through the village. The winks and amused stares ceased. The parson was favoured with nods in the square and street, and awkward greetings were passed. A man came down from a loom-loft one morning and asked him whether he had half a guinea in exchange for silver; and the parson, in his own room, made a little sound of contempt that a few round pieces of gold should thus buy civility. Then began the parson’s observations of his new parish.