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The clergywoman spoke with such vehemence that Sybil answered directly, "I know his grandmother" and then suddenly stopped herself. But as she spoke, she had turned her head with an expressive gesture in the direction of the encampment, and without waiting for more, the clergywoman ran down the path, calling on her cousin to follow her.

"Learning and the confinement of stone walls, my daughter, than which no two things could be more contrary to the nature of those who dwells in the woods and lanes. I will not deny that the clergyman and especially the young clergywoman had been very good to him; but for which he would probably have run away long before. But what is bred in the bone comes out in the flesh.

He does pretty well with the learning, and he bears with the confinement of school, though it is worse than that of the clergy-house. But when a rumour has crept out that he is not the son of the clergyman nor of the clergywoman, and he is taunted with being a gipsy and a vagrant, he lays his bare hands on those nearest to him, my daughter, and comes away on his bare feet."

"'His mother was a good daughter to you, I thinks; 'and if you hadn't sold him sold your own flesh and blood for ten golden sovereigns to the clergywoman, he might have been a good son to your old age.

The clergywoman had never moved, except that when the tinker-mother shook off her hand she locked her white fingers in front of her as before, and her eyes wandered from the old woman's face, and looked beyond it, as if she were doing what I have often done, and counting the bits of blue sky which show through the oak-leaves before they grow thick.

Men are strange creatures, my daughter." "So you left Christian with them?" "I did, my daughter. I left him in the arms of the young clergywoman with the politest of words on both sides, and a good deal of religious conversation from the parson, which I does not doubt was well meant, if it was somewhat tedious." "And then mother?"

I had hard work to summon voice to reply to him, my daughter, and I cannot tell you, nor would you understand it if I could find the words, what were my feelings to hear him speak with that confidence of the young clergywoman as his mother.

And in those baroque sects, chiefly American, which admit them they show no eagerness to put on the stole and chasuble. When the first clergywoman appeared in the United States, it was predicted by alarmists that men would be driven out of the pulpit by the new competition. Nothing of the sort has occurred, nor is it in prospect.

"Good-evening, my daughter." "I said good-bye. You don't hold with religion, do you?" "I does not, so far, my daughter; though I think the young clergywoman speaks very convincingly about it." "Don't you think that there may be a better world, Mother, for them that tries to do right, though things goes against them here?"

The young clergywoman had no children, on which score she fretted herself; and must have fretted hard, before she begged the poor tinker's child out of the woods." "What did Tinker George say?" asked the girl. "He used a good deal of bad language, and said I might as easily have got twenty pounds as ten, if I had not been as big a fool as the child's mother herself.