The following day my uncle was near himself again, and we left the Flask inn and took lodging with the widow Puddephatt. The Playstow was a little green, about half-way down the village, where the villagers reared their may-pole on May-day, and built their fires on Midsummer’s Eve, and caroused in September on the harvest-largesse won from passers-by. Round about, in a little _square_, were cottages, detached and exclusive, the _élite_ of Dunberry; and to one side was the church--but now in process of completion--in whose porch the daring would seat themselves on St. Mark’s eve to see, at midnight, the wraiths of the year’s pre-doomed come and knock at the door. Mr. Sant had, however, limited that custom, as well as some others less reputable; and the fact that he was able to do so spoke volumes for his persuasiveness. At the present time the villagers, under his stimulus, were transferring, stone by stone, to the long unfinished fabric and its adjoining school-house, the less sacred parts of the ruined foundation on the hill. Mrs. Puddephatt, though Dunberry-born, was a comparative acquisition to the village, to which she had been summoned, and to her natural succession in No. 3, the Playstow, through the death of an only sister without encumbrances. She had, in fact, gone very young, a great many years ago, into service in London, and had never set foot again in her native place until this inheritance, now two years old, had called her. She brought with her an ironic atmosphere of the great world, and a disdainful tolerance towards the little, in which her lot was now to vegetate. She had, in her high experience, “’tweenied,” “obliged,” scullery-maided, kitchen-maided, house-maided, parlour-maided, and old-maided; and she had somehow emerged from this five-fold chrysalis of virginity the widow Puddephatt--no one knew by what warrant, other than that of a sort of waspish charity-girl cap, with a knuckle-bone frill round her face. But then her knowledge of men was so matrimonial that it was admitted nothing but a husband could have inspired it. Her dictums, in respect to this mystic experience, were _merum sal_ to the wives of Dunberry. “Look in the pot for your new gownd,” and “The way to a man’s purse is through his mouth,” may be bracketed for utterances cryptic to the “general,” but not to _their_ delighted understandings. “A hopen ’and comes empty ’ome.” “A man shuts his sweet’art’s mouth with a kiss, but his wife’s heyes.” “Be careful of a Saturday morning to mend the ’ole in your man’s pocket.” “When your ’usband talks of his hage, be sure he means yours.”