Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 41870-h.htm or 41870-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41870/41870-h/41870-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41870/41870-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://archive.org/details/goldincensewestc00pear Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). GOLD AND INCENSE [Illustration] GOLD AND INCENSE A West Country Story by MARK GUY PEARSE [Publisher's mark] Forty-seventh Thousand London Horace Marshall & Son Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. Dedication TO SIDNEY HILL ESQ. OF LANGFORD HOUSE SOMERSET _It may add to the interest of my story if I state that it is perfectly true._ Chapter I To think it is Jennifer Petch of whom I am going to tell--little Jennifer. How she would laugh if she only knew of it, that shrill, silvery laugh of hers. It was her great gift. Jennifer was a philosopher in the matter of laughing; and philosophy is mostly a matter of knowing how to laugh and when. [Illustration] And the village itself would wonder almost as much as Jennifer herself, for very few of them could see anything to write about in her. Village people do not see much in what they see always, and Jennifer had lived among them all her days. There was a time when some of the younger folks thought they owed her a little bit of a grudge. For Sam Petch was the tallest, and straightest, and handsomest of the village lads; and the maidens who strolled down the lane on a summer's evening would go home with fluttering hearts and delicious dreams if Sam had chanced to come that way, as somehow he generally did; and if he had loitered laughing with them in the lane, as he never minded doing. There was Phyllis, light of hair and blue of eye, light of step and light of heart, and light of hand, as her butter showed--not one of the lads had any chance with her so long as Sam was free. There was Chloe, she of the loose sun-bonnet, with gipsy face and gipsy eyes, who handled the rake so daintily, and drew the sweet hay together with such grace that nobody wondered if Sam Petch found it a great deal easier to turn his head that way than to turn it back again. And on the Sunday night when the service was over, at the door of the little chapel, which was the village trysting place, there were half a dozen of the comeliest of the maidens, who found an excuse to linger talking, until Sam had gone his way. It came on them all with an amazement of surprise, especially as events of that kind were always busily whispered abroad at the slightest hint, and often without any hint at all--"Sam Petch was going to be married." "Who to?" asked everybody, brightening with wonder.