see "his Reverence." I asked whether the case was not one in which a lady would do as well as the clergyman; my visitor replied that it possibly might be such an one, "if like St. Paul, ma'am, you will hear me patiently," and down sat the pensioner as if determined to enact the image of patience herself. "I want to know, ma'am," he began, "by what rule or authority Pensioner Brown dares to pull up the tether of my goats in his Reverence's fields?" I evaded the question by begging to be informed what business the goats had had there, and he answered that "it was the Sabbath day." Upon this I reminded him that he had asked no permission from us, and my observation appeared at once to furnish him with a mode of defence. "I could not ask permission, ma'am," he answered in a virtuously injured manner, "it was the Sabbath day, ma'am. You know, ma'am," he continued, "the Bible says we may feed our beasts upon that day," and here he lowered his voice condescendingly on account of my probable ignorance of the passage to which he referred, "but ask leave on the Sabbath to tether them?" (and at this point his tones rose high with moral indignation,) "O, dear no, ma'am, I could not think of doing no such thing!"
We were often struck by the regularity with which two or three days of rain almost always occurred in the otherwise hot and dry month of February, generally about the thirteenth; a most beneficent provision of nature, enabling the farmers to sow their fields some weeks before the regular rains set in, since this, which was called the first rain, was followed by a return of extreme heat. Churning ends towards the beginning of November, and though I
