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Victorian Short Stories: Stories of Courtship by Unknown
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There or thereabouts--I will not say by the waters of which little river
it is washed--is the parish of Oxney Colne. And for those who would wish
to see all the beauties of this lovely country a sojourn in Oxney Colne
would be most desirable, seeing that the sojourner would then be brought
nearer to all that he would delight to visit, than at any other spot in
the country. But there is an objection to any such arrangement. There
are only two decent houses in the whole parish, and these are--or were
when I knew the locality--small and fully occupied by their possessors.
The larger and better is the parsonage in which lived the parson and his
daughter; and the smaller is the freehold residence of a certain Miss Le
Smyrger, who owned a farm of a hundred acres which was rented by one
Farmer Cloysey, and who also possessed some thirty acres round her own
house which she managed herself, regarding herself to be quite as great
in cream as Mr. Cloysey, and altogether superior to him in the article of
cider. 'But yeu has to pay no rent, Miss,' Farmer Cloysey would say, when
Miss Le Smyrger expressed this opinion of her art in a manner too
defiant. 'Yeu pays no rent, or yeu couldn't do it.' Miss Le Smyrger was
an old maid, with a pedigree and blood of her own, a hundred and thirty
acres of fee-simple land on the borders of Dartmoor, fifty years of age,
a constitution of iron, and an opinion of her own on every subject under
the sun.

And now for the parson and his daughter. The parson's name was
Woolsworthy--or Woolathy as it was pronounced by all those who lived
around him--the Rev. Saul Woolsworthy; and his daughter was Patience
Woolsworthy, or Miss Patty, as she was known to the Devonshire world of
those parts. That name of Patience had not been well chosen for her for
she was a hot-tempered damsel, warm in her convictions, and inclined to
express them freely. She had but two closely intimate friends in the
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