unfortunately presented itself, most irritating to her critics, so
anxious promptly to gratify their philosophic tendency towards
scientific grouping. Mrs. Mobbs, who lived next door to her, averred
that she always slept with the window open. Mrs. Mobbs, like
everybody else, never opened her window except to "air the room."
Mrs. Mobbs' best bedroom was carpeted all over, and contained a great
four-post bedstead, hung round with heavy hangings, and protected at
the top from draughts by a kind of firmament of white dimity. Mrs.
Mobbs stuffed a sack of straw up the chimney of the fireplace, to
prevent the fall of the "sutt," as she called it. Mrs. Mobbs, if she
had a visitor, gave her a hot supper, and expected her immediately
afterwards to go upstairs, draw the window curtains, get into this
bed, draw the bed curtains also, and wake up the next morning
"bilious." This was the proper thing to do. Miss Leroy's sitting-
room was decidedly disorderly; the chairs were dusty; "yer might
write yer name on the table," Mrs. Mobbs declared; but, nevertheless,
the casement was never closed night nor day; and, moreover, Miss
Leroy was believed by the strongest circumstantial evidence to wash
herself all over every morning, a habit which Mrs. Mobbs thought
"weakening," and somehow connected with ethical impropriety. When
Miss Leroy was married, and first as an elderly woman became known to
me, she was very inconsequential in her opinions, or at least
appeared so to our eyes. She must have been much more so when she
was younger. In our town we were all formed upon recognised
patterns, and those who possessed any one mark of the pattern, had
all. The wine-merchant, for example, who went to church, eminently
respectable, Tory, by no means associating with the tradesfolk who
displayed their goods in the windows, knowing no "experience," and
who had never felt the outpouring of the Spirit, was a specimen of a
class like him. Another class was represented by the dissenting