"Yes, no doubt about it, very bad," he said. "Well, I'll take you to my new home, and you shall have the first position in my cabinet of specimens, being kept as a memorial of my welcome to Dumford." "Well," he said, as he reached the church gate, "I've made two friends already, and--perhaps--an enemy. By Jove, there's another brick." Volume 1, Chapter III. AT THE FOUNDRY HOUSE. Mrs Glaire lived in a great blank-looking red-brick house in the main street, two ugly steep stone steps coming down from the front door on to the narrow kidney pebble path, and encroaching so upon the way that they were known as the tipsy-turvies, in consequence of the number of excited Dumfordites who fell over them in the dark. Though for the matter of that they were awkward for the most sober wayfarer, and in a town with a Local Board would have been condemned long before. The ugliness of the Foundry House, as it was called, only dwelt on the side giving on the street; the back opened upon an extensive garden, enclosed by mighty red-brick walls, for the greater part concealed by the dense foliage, which made the fine old garden a bosky wilderness of shady lawn, walk, and shrubbery. For Mrs Glaire was great upon flowers, in fact, after "my son, Richard," her garden stood at the top of her affections, even before her niece, Eve, whom she loved very dearly all the same. Mrs Glaire was a little busy ant of a woman, with a pleasant, fair face, ornamented with two tufts of little fuzzy blonde curls, which ought to have hung down, but which seemed to be screwed up so tightly that they took delight in sticking out at all kinds of angles, one or two of the most wanton--those with the rough ends--that had been untwisted by Mrs Glaire's curl-papers, even going so far as to stick straight up. On the morning when the new vicar made his entry into Dumford, Mrs Glaire was out in her garden busy. She had on her brown holland apron, and her print drawn hood, the strings of which seemed to cut deeply into her little double chin, and altogether did nothing to improve her personal appearance. A little basket was in one hand half-filled with the dead leaves of geraniums which she had been snipping off with the large garden scissors she held in the other hand--scissors which, for fear of being mislaid, were attached to a silken cord, evidently the former trimming of some article of feminine attire, and this cord was tied round her waist. She had two attendants--Prince and the gardener, Jacky Budd--Jacky: for it was the peculiarity of Dumford that everybody was known by a familiar interpretation of his Christian name, or else by a _sobriquet_ more quaint than pleasant.