In the swale of the day, towards Easter-time, the Reverend Mr. Sumption was walking along the North Road from Dallington to Woods Corner. Dallington is the mother-parish of the country bounded by the Four Roads, though there is also a church at Brownbread Street, in charge of a curate. Mr. Sumption had no truck with either Rector or curate, for he was a minister of the Particular Baptists, who had a Bethel in Sunday Street, as the lane was called which linked the East Road with one that trailed in and out of farms and woods to the throws at Bucksteep Manor. Not that the sect of the Particular Baptists flourished in the parish of Dallington, but the Bethel being midway between the church and the chapel, a fair congregation could be raked in on wet Sundays from the middle district, where doctrine, like most things in that land of farms, was swung by the weather. The Reverend Mr. Sumption was a big, handsome man of forty-five, and wore a semi-clerical suit of greenish-black, with a shabby hat and a dirty collar. His face was brown, darkening round the jaw with a beard that wanted the razor twice a day, but did not get it. His eyes were dark and sunk deep in his head, gleaming like deep ditch-water under eyebrows as smooth and black as broom-pods. His teeth were very white, and his hair was grey and curly like a fleece. As he walked he muttered to himself, and from time to time cracked the joints of his fingers with a loud rapping sound. These two habits helped form the local opinion that he was “queer,” an opinion bolstered by more evidence than is usual in such cases. Women standing in their cottage doors noticed him twice halt and stoop—once to pick up a beetle which was laboriously crawling from ditch to ditch, another time to pick up a swede dropped from some farm-cart. He carefully put the beetle on the opposite bank—“Near squashed you, my dear, I did. But He Who created the creeping things upon the earth has preserved you from the boot of man.” The swede he dusted and crammed in his pocket. It was known throughout the hamlets—the “Streets” and “Greens”—of Dallington Parish that the minister was as poor as he was unblushing about his poverty.