How different are the real villages, and how various! Take the case of my friend Burney’s parish. An oblong surface through which a high road runs straight as a ruler--wide ditches dividing the fields, with never a hedge and never a tree--nine square miles of land with a population of 900 human beings, here and there collected into an ugly hamlet, each with a central alehouse, and a few feeble poplars looking as if they were ashamed of themselves. There is not a farmer in the parish who occupies 300 acres of land. There is not a squire’s house within a radius of eleven miles from the rectory door. The nearest market town is six miles off, the nearest railway station five. Friend Burney has his house and garden and perhaps £350 a year to spend--that is quite the outside. Every morning he goes to his school a long mile off, every afternoon he has some one to “look after,” to visit in sickness or sorrow, to watch or advise or comfort. One year with another he calculates that he has to walk at least 1,500 miles in the way of duty. As to the mere Sunday work, that needs no dwelling on; take it all in all, it is about the least _wearing_ and least troublesome part of the parson’s duties, always provided he puts his heart into it, and has some faculty for it. But in all that tract of country over which he is sometimes cruelly assumed to be no more than a spiritual overseer, among all those 900 people, there is not a single man, woman, or child that cares to talk to him, or ever does talk to him, about anything outside the parish and its concerns. Nay! I forgot the schoolmaster and his wife. They are young, intelligent, hopeful, and they came out of Yorkshire, and have something to say of their experience in the North. But they are just a little--undeniably a _little_ sore, just a _little_ touchy: they have a grievance. When they first came down to X., Mrs. Rector did not leave her card on Mrs. Petticogges. It was a slight. It was hoity-toity, it was airified. That is not all; the farmers are not, as you may say, _cordial_ with the schoolmaster; and Farmer Gay, the big man who holds 700 acres in the next parish and gives lawn-tennis parties, never had the grace to take any notice of the Petticogges, does not in fact _know_ the Petticogges. Meanwhile, friend Burney is manager of the school, and by far the largest contributor to the funds, and day by day he is in and out, he and his daughters. But there is no time to talk or confer. The Petticogges have their hands full; when their day’s work is over they have had enough of it. Round and round and round they go in the dreary mill; every now and then there is a new regulation of My Lords to worry them, a new book to get up, a new code to study. Then there are the pupil teachers to look after, and returns to make up, and all the dull routine which has to be got through.