The Vicar, lest the higher purpose of his visits should be overlooked if he went to Bettesworth as alms-giver too, had entrusted me with a few shillings for the old man, who received them gladly, but seemed equally pleased to have been remembered. When I handed the money over, and named the giver, "Oh ah!" he said, "he come to see me. I was layin' with my face to the wall, and Liz come up and says, 'Here's the Vicar come to see ye.' 'The Vicar!' I says, 'what do _he_ want to see me for?' I reckon he must have heard me say it. He set an' talked...." But Bettesworth did not vouchsafe any information as to the interview. When well and strong, he had been suspicious of the clergy; now, I believe, he was a little uncomfortable with a feeling that he had made a hole in his manners. Feeble though he was, on the previous day he had crept downstairs, he said, and even out and to the corner of the road forty yards away. I think it must have been on some similar expedition that those women saw him, and uttered their discouraging exclamations upon his look of ill-health; but the desire to be up and out was incurable in him. Yesterday, however, he fell, and had to be helped home, where he literally crawled upstairs on hands and knees, exhausted and breathless. So now, since the breathlessness troubled him, and since he knew me to have had bronchitis, did I know, he asked, "anything as 'd ease it"? Eagerly he asked it, with a most pitiful reliance upon me; but I had to confess that I knew no cure; and the poor old man seemed as if a support he had clutched at had disappeared. Drearily he spoke of his condition. He couldn't eat: a pint of milk was all he had been able to take yesterday; the same that morning. Liz had said, "'We got a nice little bit o' hock--couldn't ye eat a bit o' that?'" and had brought him a piece, but he "couldn't face it." "But what's goin' to become of ye?" she exclaimed, "if you don't eat nothing?" But he couldn't. His mouth was so dry; he was unable to swallow anything solid. Was there anything I could get him, that he would fancy? He hesitated; then, "Well, ... I _should_ like a bit o' rhubarb. They had some here t'other day--little bits o' sticks no bigger 'n your finger. And they boys set down to it.... 'En't ye goin' to spare me _none_?' I says." ... The story wilted away, leaving me with a belief that none had been spared for him. So I promised him some rhubarb, and the next day a small tart was made and sent over to him. The bearer returned saying that Liz, seeing it, had laughed: "We got plenty, and he's had several lots." If this is true, as it probably is, Bettesworth's delusion on the point is the first instance of senility attacking his intellect.