gentlefolks gave her for her cough. Under this name too, they were used
with great effect as a means of taming refractory children, so that at
the sight of poor Miss Anne's sallow face, several small urchins had a
terrified sense that she was cognizant of all their worst misdemeanours,
and knew the precise number of stones with which they had intended to
hit Farmer Britton's ducks. But for all who saw them through a
less mythical medium, the Miss Irwines were quite superfluous
existences--inartistic figures crowding the canvas of life without
adequate effect. Miss Anne, indeed, if her chronic headaches could have
been accounted for by a pathetic story of disappointed love, might have
had some romantic interest attached to her: but no such story had either
been known or invented concerning her, and the general impression was
quite in accordance with the fact, that both the sisters were old maids
for the prosaic reason that they had never received an eligible offer.

Nevertheless, to speak paradoxically, the existence of insignificant
people has very important consequences in the world. It can be shown to
affect the price of bread and the rate of wages, to call forth many evil
tempers from the selfish and many heroisms from the sympathetic, and,
in other ways, to play no small part in the tragedy of life. And if that
handsome, generous-blooded clergyman, the Rev. Adolphus Irwine, had not
had these two hopelessly maiden sisters, his lot would have been shaped
quite differently: he would very likely have taken a comely wife in his
youth, and now, when his hair was getting grey under the powder, would
have had tall sons and blooming daughters--such possessions, in short,
as men commonly think will repay them for all the labour they take under
the sun. As it was--having with all his three livings no more than seven
hundred a-year, and seeing no way of keeping his splendid mother and his
sickly sister, not to reckon a second sister, who was usually spoken of
without any adjective, in such ladylike ease as became their birth