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I wouldn't give a straw for the best wine that ever was vinted, after it had lain here a couple of years." Mr. Arabin assented and promised that the cellar should be reconstructed according to the archdeacon's receipt. "And, Arabin, look here; was such an attempt at a kitchen grate ever seen?" "The grate is really very bad," said Mrs. Grantly.
"It is far more likely that Lalage has done something," said my mother. "After her promise to you what could she have done?" "She might have kept it." I thought this over and got a grip on the meaning by degrees. "You mean," I said, "that she has appealed to my uncle on some point about the Archdeacon's qualifications." "Exactly." "But that wouldn't upset him so much."
The Archdeacon, then over eighty, had been tutor to Gladstone, and one day the future Bishop turned the conversation into a reminiscent channel, and sought to evoke the Archdeacon's memories of the long past. Presently the Archdeacon abruptly changed the subject by asking, "What was the concert of the Philharmonic like last night?"
On the morning after the archdeacon's futile visit to the palace, Dr Stanhope came down stairs with an ominously dark look about his eyebrows; his white locks were rougher than usual, and he breathed thickly and loudly as he took his seat in his arm-chair. He had open letters in his hand, and when Charlotte came into the room he was still reading them.
Whereupon the archdeacon declared with a loud laugh that he would tell Miss Thorne that her new minister had likened her to a navvy. Eleanor, however, pronounced such a conclusion unfair; a comparison might be very just in its proportions which did not at all assimilate the things compared. But Mr Arabin went in subtilising, regarding neither the archdeacon's raillery nor Eleanor's defence.
Robertson, who at one time paid the Umhlali a visit, bringing with them their whole train of converts, servants, orphans, and adopted children, who could be easily accommodated by putting up fresh grass huts, to which even the Europeans of the party had become so accustomed, that they viewed a chameleon tumbling down on the dinner-table with rather more indifference than we do the intrusion of an earwig, quite acquiesced in periodically remaking the clay floor when the white ants were coming up through it, scorpions being found in the Archdeacon's whiskers, and green snakes, instead of mice, being killed by the cat.
The Le Bretons are a really good family, you see; and the Archdeacon's exceedingly fond of them. So I thought if you could tell me where this young man is lodging you shop-people pick up all the gossip in the place, always I'd ask him to dinner to meet the Rector and Colonel Turnbull and my nephew, who would probably be able to offer him a little shooting.
We can then imagine what England must have been with an archdeacon's commissary sitting constantly in every town; exercising an undefined jurisdiction over general morality; and every court swarming with petty lawyers who lived upon the fees which they could extract. Such a system for the administration of justice was perhaps never tolerated before in any country.
Sir Roger de Coverley takes tea i'fackins with the Parson, and the Stalwart Farmer passes the sugar to the Man from Town, who is gazing out wistfully towards the Village Green, where the Village Beauty foots it featly with the Village Idiot. The last Act passes in the Drawing-Boom of "Bo tree" House, where the Archdeacon's Daughter touches her tinkling guitar and warbles a plaintive ballad:
It was agreed at the rectory that the archdeacon should go over with him and assist at the reading desk, and that Mr. Harding should take the archdeacon's duty at Plumstead Church. Mrs. Grantly had her school and her buns to attend to, and professed that she could not be spared, but Mrs. Bold was to accompany them.
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