Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/104

92 who was ninety-four years of age, had held the living for fifty of them, but had never preached a sermon there for forty. There was a worthy curate, but so poor that he was held in contempt by the rude flock.

Hannah applied for a lease of the Vicarage, and obtained it; also that the place should be put in repair at the vicar's expense.

To find teachers was the next great difficulty. Her plan was to have a mistress to teach the poorest reading and work, together with a master for the Sunday-school and for the farmers' children. But no one was trained, and the only chance was to get persons of the small amount of education required, with devout spirits and some power of discipline, and form them to the work. Happily, when "teaching their own governesses," the Misses More had acquired some experience of this unusual and needful kind; and Mrs. Baker, of Cheddar, seems, like Mary More herself, to have been one of the women formed by nature for school government.

There was reported to exist a young woman, daughter to a farmer, and busied with the hard toil of a dairy in a cheese-making country, who had nevertheless formed a little Sunday-school of thirty children, buying them books and gingerbread as rewards out of her own small pittance. Hannah and Patty mounted their horses and went off to see her. They found her able to read and write fairly well, religious,