372 Leaves from the Journal of the Poor Wiltshire Vicar. 



" ' Why, [I hope your family has not received any addition. I think'] you 

 have only two daughters, Mr. Vicar.' 



" ' Yes, your reverence ; but they are growing up. My Jenny, the eldest, 

 is now eighteen, and Polly, the younger, will soon be twelve.' 



" ' So much the better. Cannot the girls work ? ' 



" I was about to reply ; but he did not allow me to speak, but getting up, 

 said [while he went to the window'] ' I have not any time whatever today 

 to enter into it further. Think it over whether you will keep the position 

 with £15 a year, and then let me know. If you cannot, I wish you a better 

 vicarage for a New Year's gift.' 



" [He bowed very politely, and touched his cap, as if wishing me to be 

 gone.'] He had never received or dismissed me so coldly before. He did 

 not even, as usual, offer me dinner. 



" I had reckoned on it, for I had come away fasting from Crekelade in the 

 early morning. [Having bought a penny loaf at a bakers' shop in the 

 outskirts of the town, I took my way homeward. But fy, Thomas ! Shame 

 upon thy faint heart ! Lives not the gracious God still ! "What if thou hadst 

 lost the place entirely ! And it is only £5 less ! It is indeed a quarter of 

 my whole little yearly stipend, and it leaves barely 10</. a day to feed and 

 clothe three of us. What is there left for us '? He who clothes the lilies of 

 the field, and feeds the young ravens, will He not shield us with his Provi- 

 dence ! Arouse thee, faint heart ! We must deny ourselves some of our 

 wonted luxuries.'] 



" December 16th. I believe Jenny is an angel. Her soul is more beautiful 

 than her person. I am almost ashamed of being her father; she is so much 

 more pious than I am." [&c., &c.] 



The reader will notice that in the foregoing lines the drift of 

 the brief sketch of 1766 has been closely followed by Zschokke, and 

 that he has adopted its pliraseology so far as it went in his expanded 

 narrative. In the record of subsequent days he becomes indepen- 

 pent of his predecessor and carries on the story on his own lines. 



I am at present ratlier sceptical about the existence of anything 

 longer than the Curate's (week's) Journal in 1766, or until Zschokke 

 brought out the Vicar's (month's) Diary a generation later, in 

 German. I think it would have been quite within his power to 

 acquire the local colouring of the Wiltshire names of places, while 

 the fact of his producing such unlikely names oijyersons, whenever 

 he leaves the guidance of the Curate's Week, inclines me to con- 

 clude that we owe the longer story, in almost all its details, to his 



' Chambers's Miscellany, ii. (n. 17), 2. , 



