All the parish was always ready to testify that poor old Madam had had a
sight o' troubles. All the parish took a certain awful pleasure in
relating them; it was a sort of distinction to have among them such an
unfortunate woman and mother, so that the very shepherds' and ditchers'
wives plumed themselves upon it over those in the next parish, where the
old Squire and his wife had never lost one of their many children, or
had any trouble "to speak of." "For there was no call to count his
eldest son's running off with a dairymaid, it being well beknown," they
would observe with severity, "that his mother never would let e'er a one
of the young madams as were suitable to marry him come nigh the house."

The dairymaid belonged to their parish, and so afforded them another
ground of triumph over their rivals. "Besides," they would say, "wasn't
their own church parson--old parson Green that everybody swore
by--wasn't he distinctly heard to say to the young man's father, 'that
he might ha' been expected to do wus'? They didn't see, for their parts,
that aught but good had come of it neither; but as for poor old Madam,
anybody might see that no good ever came nigh her. We must submit
ourselves to the Almighty's will," they would add with reverence. They
couldn't tell why He had afflicted her, but they prayed Him to be
merciful to her in her latter end.

It was in old parson Green's time, the man they all swore by, that they
talked thus; but when parson Craik came, they learned some new words,
and instead of accepting trouble with the religious acquiescence of the
ignorant, they began to wonder and doubt, and presently to offend their
rivals by their fine language. "Mysterious, indeed," they would say, "is
the ways of Providence."