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Updated: May 2, 2025
His father, the descendant of a long line of Staffordshire yeomen, Quakers by persuasion, loved a roaming life, and having married a maltster's widow with a talent for business management, was left free to indulge his own propensities.
"Now, don't ye take on so, shepherd, and sit down!" said Henery, with a deprecating peacefulness equal to anything of the kind in Christianity. "We hear that ye be a extraordinary good and clever man, shepherd." said Joseph Poorgrass with considerable anxiety from behind the maltster's bed- stead whither he had retired for safety.
Here he placed his fist, rather smaller in size than a common loaf, in the mathemarical centre of the maltster's little table, and with it gave a bump or two thereon, as if to ensure that their eyes all thoroughly took in the idea of fistiness before he went further.
Liddy, the maltster's great-granddaughter, was about Bathsheba's equal in age, and her face was a prominent advertisement of the light-hearted English country girl.
The maltster's lack of teeth appeared not to sensibly diminish his powers as a mill. He had been without them for so many years that toothlessness was felt less to be a defect than hard gums an acquisition. Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.
"Why, he is a maltster, is he not?" I said. "Well: he married a maltster's widow, who is dead now. "An old soldier?" I asked. "Yes: he was a Colonel under Oliver." Such was the opening; and after that we talked more freely, though not so freely as, I doubt not, they had talked for an hour before I came.
It was because so many people there and in the town and in London, knew her, that she was able to take the old house which was once the maltster's, and have it done up nicely, and the great long room that had been the front office and sample-room turned into a school-room, and the pretty little parlour fitted with French windows, that it might open to the garden full of rose-bushes and standard apple-trees, and with its red brick walls covered with plums and jessamine.
The solicitor's villa had a large garden, and the gardener and his wife lived in the cottage which had once belonged to the maltster's foreman at the end of the orchard and close to the old kiln, so they were always ready to help too; and our governess had very little to pay for gardening except a few shillings for a labourer now and then.
There was a very curious kind of eagerness in the maltster's voice, which puzzled me not a little; and there was a change of manner too in him, that puzzled me no less. He spoke as if he had almost expected me, or was peculiarly astonished to see me there; and there was none of that hail-fellow air about him any more.
It sounded again as she stood looking at old Foster the maltster's picture there on the mantelpiece where Quisanté did not like to see it. For what was the meaning of it to her, declared by her perverse determination to keep it there and plain enough to her husband's quick wit?
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