“I do it for bread, naturally. They bring in a few shillings. It is just a fluke that I can make them at all. I know as much about a needle ordinarily as a flying-machine; but I learnt to knit once under protest. I sprained my ankle and was laid up for some weeks, and I told the doctor I should go stark, staring mad if he kept me shut up in a house doing nothing. He said knitting was a very good preventive to madness, and he’d send his wife along. She was a great missionary worker, and she pounced on me like a hawk, and started me off knitting socks for little gutta-percha babies somewhere in the Antipodes, almost before I knew where I was. Such insanity!… as if white babies wanted to be bothered with socks, much less black ones! I told the doctor it was adding insult to injury to allow it to appear I hadn’t more common sense than to occupy my time with garments for the heathen. As if there weren’t too many garments in the world already, half the community over-dressed, and ready to sell its soul for more. ‘Leave them clean and healthy and naked, that’s my advice, doctor,’ I told him; ‘and if you weren’t afraid of your wife you’d agree.’” Ethel leaned against the table, enjoying the rugged face and comically twisted mouth. “But I thought you were a clergyman’s daughter?” she said. “So I am; but I don’t see why I shouldn’t be credited with a little common sense even then. I know they haven’t much as a rule; what with their sewing-classes, and praying-classes, and mothers’ meetings smothering up their minds till they can’t see beyond their noses. I never had much to do with that part of it. They didn’t like me well enough in the village to want to pray with me nor sew with me; which was just as well, for if I’d prayed, I should have implored the Almighthy to open their minds a little, and widen their views, and give them each a good thick slab of devilry to counteract their general soppiness and short-sighted stupidity. Ugh!… to hear some of those soppy folks praying to be delivered from the Evil One, and to have strength given them to cast the devil from their hearts! Just as if the devil had time to bother with that sanctimonious, chicken-hearted crew. He wasn’t very likely to do them the compliment of acknowledging their existence.” “Did no one do any parish work then?” “Oh, yes, the doctor’s wife did most of it. And when a new doctor came they daren’t for the life of them have a word to say to him, for fear of the next prayer-meeting, when she would preside. You see, she’d pray for the lost sheep in the fold for about half an hour, and how he went to the wolf for healing, which was the new doctor—instead of the saviour, which was her husband, the old one, and drew lurid pictures of the fiery poisons and deadly draughts the wolf gave the poor sheep to kill him instead of cure him.” “And what became of the new doctor?”