Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/131

Rh school, and is inveigled into it. There a lesson on the Eighth Commandment touches his heart, and when he sees Tom on the point of being punished, he springs forward and makes full confession. He is saved from his father's vengeance by the poetical justice which kills Giles by the downfall of a wall from which he is stealing a garden-net.

There is a story of farmer life, where the wealthy farmer's wife makes all her pies and puddings on Sunday mornings to last the week, and, though the family go to church in the afternoon, it is to converse with their neighbours in the next pew during the Lessons. The daughters go to a boarding-school, and a worthy lover is rejected because he cannot dance the menuet de la cour, though he had curried some favour by making out a rebus or two in the Lady's Diary. As their father says: "When I want to know what hops are a bag, they are snatching the paper to know what violet soap is a pound. And as to the dairy, they never care how cow's milk goes as long as they can get some stuff they call milk of roses. Seeing them disputing violently the other day about cream and butter, I thought it a sign they were beginning to care for the farm, till I found it was cold cream for the hands and jessamine butter for the hair." He takes up one of their books, and "I was fairly taken in at first, and began to think I had got hold of a godly book, for there was a deal about hope and despair and death, and