In answer to this I never said a word, being unable to contradict, though doubtful how far he was right. But it made me more shy than I was already, while at the same time it seemed to fill me with interest in the matter. But the only woman I had much to do with went a long way to confirm my Uncle’s words. This was no other than Tabitha Tapscott, a widow from the West of England, who did all our cleaning and cooking for us, coming into the house at six o’clock in the summer, and seven in the winter time. A strange little creature she appeared to me, so different from us in all her ways, making mountains of things that we never noticed, and not at all given to silence. Once or twice my Uncle Corny, after a glass of hot rum and water (which he usually had on a Saturday night, to restore him after paying wages) had spoken, in a strange mysterious style, of having “had his time,” or as he sometimes put it—“paid his footing.” It was not easy to make out his drift, or the hint at the bottom of it; and if any one tried to follow him home, sometimes he would fly off into rudeness, or if in a better vein, convey that he held his tongue for the good of younger people. Such words used to stir me sadly, because I could get no more of them. However, I began to feel more and more, as youth perhaps is sure to do when it listens to dark experience, as if I should like almost to go through some of it on my own behalf. Not expecting at all to leave it as a lesson for those who come after me, but simply desiring to enter into some knowledge of the thing forbidden. For I knew not as yet that there is no pleasure rich enough to satisfy the interest of pain. It was on the first Sunday of September in the year 1860, that I first left all my peaceful ways, and fell into joy and misery. And strangely enough, as some may think, it was in the quiet evening service that the sudden change befell me. That summer had been the wettest ever known, or at any rate for four and forty years; as the old men said, who recalled the time when the loaves served out to their fathers and mothers stuck fast, like clay, upon the churchyard wall. Now the river was up to the mark of the road, and the meadows on the other side were lakes, and even a young man was well pleased to feel a flint under his foot as he walked. For the road was washed with torrents, and all the hedges reeking, and the solid trunks of ancient elms seemed to be channelled with perpetual drip. But the sun began to shine out of the clouds, at his very last opportunity; and weak and watery though he looked, with a bank of haze beneath him, a soft relief of hope and comfort filled the flooded valley. And into our old western porch a pleasant light came quivering, and showed us who our neighbours were, and made us smile at one another.