CHAPTER VII

It was the year 1800, long known in English households as "the dear
year." The present generation can have no conception of what a
terrible time that was--War, Famine, and Tumult stalking
hand-in-hand, and no one to stay them. For between the upper and
lower classes there was a great gulf fixed; the rich ground the faces
of the poor, the poor hated, yet meanly succumbed to, the rich.
Neither had Christianity enough boldly to cross the line of
demarcation, and prove, the humbler, that they were men,--the higher
and wiser, that they were gentlemen.

These troubles, which were everywhere abroad, reached us even in our
quiet town of Norton Bury. For myself, personally, they touched me
not, or, at least, only kept fluttering like evil birds outside the
dear home-tabernacle, where I and Patience sat, keeping our solemn
counsel together--for these two years had with me been very hard.

Though I had to bear so much bodily suffering that I was seldom told
of any worldly cares, still I often fancied things were going ill
both within and without our doors. Jael complained in an under-key
of stinted housekeeping, or boasted aloud of her own ingenuity in
making ends meet: and my father's brow grew continually heavier,
graver, sterner; sometimes so stern that I dared not wage, what was,
openly or secretly, the quiet but incessant crusade of my existence--
the bringing back of John Halifax.

He still remained my father's clerk--nay, I sometimes thought he was
even advancing in duties and trusts, for I heard of his being sent