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 that—I say, this very morning, had it not have been for Providence watching over us all, that girl would have put—indeed I may go so far to say, ‘ad put the cheese on your breakfast table——’ He saw I was about to speak, and waved his hand at me. ‘It’s all very well for you to say, ‘Yes, Mr. Bowman, but you took away the cheese and locked it up in the cupboard,’ which I did, and have the key here, or if not the actual key one very much about the same size. That’s true enough, sir, but what do you think is the effect of that action on me? Why it’s no exaggeration for me to say that the ground is cut from under my feet. And yet when I said as much to Eliza, not nasty, mind you, but just firm like, what was my return? ‘Oh,’ she says: ‘Well,’ she says, ‘there wasn’t no bones broke, I suppose.’ Well, sir, it ‘urt me, that’s all I can say: it ‘urt me, and I don’t like to think of it now.’

There was an ominous pause here, in which I ventured to say something like, ‘Yes, very trying,’ and then asked at what hour the church service was to be. ‘Eleven o’clock,’ Mr. Bowman said with a heavy sigh. ‘Ah, you won’t have no such discourse from poor Mr. Lucas as what you would have done from