Mrs. Walsh in her own person laboured from morning till night, not only without complaint, but with a high sense of the privilege and dignity of her vocation. She brought up a large family honourably on a marvellously small income. She strengthened her husband’s hands in other respects by employing every spare moment in teaching the ignorant, reclaiming the bad, nursing the sick. Mrs. Walsh had received a solid masculine education, classical, mathematical, theological, which enabled her to act as tutor to her sons and assistant to her husband in their studies. She despised all mere shallow, graceful, feminine accomplishments, and condemned them as waste of time. In like manner she had both a natural and acquired antipathy to fine ladies. She was well matched, and in cordial sympathy with her husband, therefore she magnified the marriage tie and enforced it in the highest measure on all less happy wives, and was amazed to find that they could dream of setting it at naught, in all its length and breadth. Mrs. Walsh wore a steeple-crowned hat and cloth spencer when she went abroad in all weathers and on all occasions. Within doors she wore an equally high-crowned cap and voluminous frills, which were in correct keeping with her massive, aggressive face and towering, portly figure. Hers was a more formidable presence than that of a beadle or bailiff to all weak and froward recusants who were not utter reprobates, in the middle of the sluggishness and stolid stupidity of the country parish. Mrs. Walsh was an additional and a tremendous thorn in Lady Bell’s delicate flesh, in strict fulfilment of what the parson’s wife considered her pledge to the Squire. Mrs. Walsh had a little leisure at this time. The chronic ague and the frequent putrid fever were not so widely spread and virulent as usual, thanks, as Mrs. Walsh judged rightly, to the Lord’s blessing (but whether the exemption was to be attributed farther to her sovereign sage and ground ivy-tea, is a debatable question). The recent visit of a recruiting sergeant had enticed within the reach of the iron horse and the cat o’ nine tails some of the more troublesome young ne’er-do-wells within the bounds. Mrs. Walsh set herself to spend her holiday in taking Lady Bell Trevor to task. Mrs. Walsh would impress on Lady Bell a new code of morals, bring her to a better frame of mind, render her a useful member of society, and a reformed young woman and wife. In what Mrs. Walsh called dealing faithfully with Lady Bell, the reformer did not hesitate at the plainest speaking, the most direct home-thrusts.