ON GETTING THERE 25 



she left the room, with me in it, when she had got 

 her tea. 



It was rather a dark little room, though it had 

 two windows ; one, decorously veiled by hand- 

 netted curtains, looking on to the cheeriness of 

 the village street ; and one on to the small 

 garden, where samples of all the choice bulbs 

 from the great grower in Haarlem were set, and 

 usually failed to bloom, for the pastor, unlike 

 his brother, was a poor gardener. On the other 

 side of the passage was another room, the pastor's 

 study it may have been called. There were no 

 deep-seated leather chairs there — the chairs were 

 mostly wood, and not inviting to repose ; nor any 

 richly sombre rows of leather-bound books, there 

 were only three books, a Bible and two others, 

 and they were shabbily bound. Rather a bare 

 room, the white scrubbed floor quite carpetless, 

 except for a very small island of mat, which 

 modestly hid itself under the table. The folk 

 who came to see the pastor on questions of 

 mutual dispute or individual difficulty, or any 

 other of the hundred troubles of common 

 humanity, would seem to have been many. They 

 were the sort that wear wooden shoes, hard on 

 carpets and great carriers of dirt, the wife said, 



