Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/99

Rh the ruin of agriculture. The school was opened on the Monday, when there was a display of utter ignorance.

But when, five weeks later, Patty went to inspect proceedings before the removal to Bath for the winter, she found thirty children perfect in the Catechism, forty able to say three Psalms, and a few elder ones showing some knowledge of the Bible, the village altogether in a more decent state, the church gradually filling, and not a child on the cliffs on Sunday.

On Sunday evenings, the parents of the children were induced to come for an hour of instruction in the very foundations of religion. This was not attempted without much consideration; but the rector, on making his annual visit to receive his tithes, approved all that was done, gave half-a-guinea among the children, and left this encouragement.

Yet these exertions of the two sisters were made while "poor Patty had a wretched summer, in almost constant pain" from rheumatism in the head, and Hannah was often disabled by the same complaint. They had "ferretted about" in others of the neglected parishes during these autumn months, and had further designs for some of the "thirteen without even a resident curate"; but winter made the Mendips inaccessible, and Cowslip Green was but a "thin-walled cottage," so that the whole sisterhood migrated to their new house at Bath, whence Hannah wrote to