"Isn't the village sweet and sleepy?" said Miss Morgan, as she tripped along beside her companion; "it always reminds me of the dormouse in 'Alice in Wonderland'--always asleep except at tea-time, when it wakes up--and talks gossip. That's the chemist's shop with the two little red bottles in the window, isn't it cunning? The old man chemist doesn't keep any poisons, for he's half blind and's afraid of mixing the strychnine with the Epsom salts. His wife does the poisoning; she libels every one indifferently, and she gave out that Pamela was a lunatic and I was her keeper. She was the butcher's daughter, and she married the chemist man for his money ten years ago, hoping he'd die right off, which he didn't. He was seventy with paralysis agitans and a squint, and the squint's got worse every year, and the paralysis agitans has got better--serve her right. That's the butcher's with the one leg of mutton hanging up, and the little pot with a rose-tree in it. He drinks, and beats his wife, and hunts snakes down the road when he has the jumps--but he sells very good mutton, and he's civil. Here comes a queen, look!" A carriage drawn by a pair of chestnut horses approached and passed them, revealing a fat and bulbous-faced lady lolling on the cushions, and seen through a haze of dust. "A queen?" said Bevan; "she doesn't look like one." "No? She's the Queen of Snobs; looks as if she'd come out of a joke-book, doesn't she? and her name is--I forget. She lives in a big house a mile away. That's a 'pub.' There are seven 'pubs' in this village, and this is a model village--at least, they call it so; what an immodel village in England must be, I don't know. There's a tailor lives in that little house; he preaches in the tin chapel at the cross-roads. I heard him last Sunday." "You go to Chapel?" "No, I'm Church. I heard him as I was passing by--couldn't help it, he shouts so's you can hear him at 'The Roost' when the wind's blowing that way--You religious?" "Not very, I'm afraid." "Neither'm I. That's the doctor's; he's Church and his wife's Chapel. She has a sister in a lunatic asylum, and her aunt was sister of the hair-cutter's first wife, so people despise her and fling it in her teeth. We can raise some snobs in the States, but they're button mushrooms to the toadstools you raise in England. Pamela is awfully good to the doctor's wife just because the other people are nasty to her. Pamela is grit all through. The parson lives there--a long, thin man, looks as if he'd been mangled, and they'd forgot to hang him out to dry. How are you, Mrs Jones? and how are the rheumatics?" Miss Morgan had paused to address an old lady who stood at the door of a cottage leaning on a stick. "That's Mrs Jones; she has more enquiries after her health than any woman in England. Can you tell why?" "No."