A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 21$ 



furnish their larders almost as well. The trout grow 

 scarcer ; but they are still to be had, stout pounders, 

 here and there by the alder roots and the sluice-posts 

 in the slow yellow brooks, but two yards across, and 

 too thick to see a foot into. 



Just before we gained Tisfield street, we met the 

 Vicar, a youngish man newly come to the living. 

 Avery knows Tisfield affairs pretty well, and doesn't 

 think Mr. Hawkins gets on very particular with the 

 people. They look back to the late Vicar, a man 

 whom the new generation called unclerical, but 

 who was a real countryman in the country, knew 

 the ways and thoughts of his flock, and was well 

 versed in several branches of learning ignored by 

 the rural parson in these times of deepened 

 spirituality. But it was this man's predecessor, the 

 Reverend John Scrase, who was Avery's ideal parish 

 priest ; he was a famous vet., and had a power with 

 pigs that overcame the customary belief that pig- 

 maladies are incurable, and that when a pig " fails " 

 he should be made butcher's meat at once. Avery 

 cannot see that this gift was any detriment to the 

 practice of spiritual medicine. He remembers that 

 when his old master and the sow were both con- 

 sidered to be in extremis, Parson Scrase was fetched 

 to both, over the heads of Lunsford the farrier and 



