Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/53

 and caves? as well as clean mouthed? Perhaps they are hermits to be clean and fresh, while the others are to be dirty.

I never saw the parson at or near the village, though he had a bike, and was a well knit, active man, quite young—an athlete, in fact, and a keen sportsman. He had a tombstone in the churchyard, sacred to the memory of his third wife—or was it his fourth?—and they said that "parson was keep'n company again." He wore tourist jacket, cap, knickerbockers, and a bike—the last mostly between his legs—whenever I saw him. He seemed an improvement on "The Private Secretary." But I can't think exactly in which way. He might have been more useful out here in an English eleven.

The Shepperton doctor was Scottish—and a friend of mine. So I won't write about him.

There was that something of the "sullen, silent" atmosphere—without the "half-devil and half-child" business about the village which had struck me forcibly while school teaching a pah of low-class Maories at the other side of the world a year or two before. Men and women worked in the fields for, the men from fifteen shillings to a pound a week, and the women seven to eleven shillings. I used to hear them calling each other in the dark, on bitter cold mornings. Those who had children, and no old granny capable of looking after them, used to club together and pay one of their number to look after the children while they were in the fields. Some had to pay to have old granny looked after, too. The children who