shillings a peck."

And then she would glance at our flour-mill, where for several days a
week the water-wheel was as quiet as on Sundays; for my father kept
his grain locked up, waiting for what, he wisely judged, might be a
worse harvest than the last. But Jael, though she said nothing,
often looked at the flour-mill and shook her head. And after one
market-day--when she came in rather "flustered," saying there had
been a mob outside the mill, until "that young man Halifax" had gone
out and spoken to them--she never once allowed me to take my rare
walk under the trees in the Abbey-yard; nor, if she could help it,
would she even let me sit watching the lazy Avon from the
garden-wall.

One Sunday--it was the 1st of August, for my father had just come
back from meeting, very much later than usual, and Jael said he had
gone, as was his annual custom on that his wedding-day, to the
Friends' burial ground in St. Mary's Lane, where, far away from her
own kindred and people, my poor young mother had been laid,--on this
one Sunday I began to see that things were going wrong. Abel
Fletcher sat at dinner wearing the heavy, hard look which had grown
upon his face not unmingled with the wrinkles planted by physical
pain. For, with all his temperance, he could not quite keep down his
hereditary enemy, gout; and this week it had clutched him pretty
hard.

Dr. Jessop came in, and I stole away gladly enough, and sat for an
hour in my old place in the garden, idly watching the stretch of
meadow, pasture, and harvest land. Noticing, too, more as a pretty
bit in the landscape than as a fact of vital importance, in how many