Gaspilton with a certain literary dignity, even in Kensingate circles,
and would place her on a pinnacle in St. Chuddocks, where hardly any one
read French, and assuredly no one had heard of _L'Abreuvoir interdit_.
The Rector's wife might be content to turn her back complacently on the
country; it was the Rector's tragedy that the country turned its back on
him. With the best intention in the world and the immortal example of
Gilbert White before him, the Rev. Wilfrid found himself as bored and ill
at ease in his new surroundings as Charles II would have been at a modern
Wesleyan Conference. The birds that hopped across his lawn hopped across
it as though it were their lawn, and not his, and gave him plainly to
understand that in their eyes he was infinitely less interesting than a
garden worm or the rectory cat. The hedgeside and meadow flowers were
equally uninspiring; the lesser celandine seemed particularly unworthy of
the attention that English poets had bestowed on it, and the Rector knew
that he would be utterly miserable if left alone for a quarter of an hour
in its company. With the human inhabitants of his parish he was no
better off; to know them was merely to know their ailments, and the
ailments were almost invariably rheumatism.
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