‘I know it will do’
Miss Stanbury carried her letter all the way to the
chief post-office in the city, having no faith whatever
in those little subsidiary receiving houses which
are established in different parts of the city.
As for the iron pillar boxes which had been erected
of late years for the receipt of letters, one of which—a
most hateful thing to her—stood almost
close to her own hall door, she had not the faintest
belief that any letter put into one of them would ever
reach its destination. She could not understand
why people should not walk with their letters to a
respectable post-office instead of chucking them into
an iron stump as she called it out in the middle of
the street with nobody to look after it. Positive
orders had been given that no letter from her house
should ever be put into the iron post. Her epistle
to her sister-in-law, of whom she never spoke otherwise
than as Mrs Stanbury, was as follows:
The Close, Exeter, 22nd April, 186
My dear Sister Stanbury,
Your son, Hugh, has taken to courses of which I do
not approve, and therefore I have put an end to my
connection with him. I shall be happy to entertain
your daughter Dorothy in my house if you and she approve
of such a plan. Should you agree to this, she
will be welcome to receive you or her sister, not
her brother, in my house any Wednesday morning between
half-past nine and half-past twelve. I will endeavour
to make my house pleasant to her and useful, and will
make her an allowance of 25 pounds per annum for her
clothes as long as she may remain with me. I
shall expect her to be regular at meals, to be constant
in going to church, and not to read modern novels.
I intend the arrangement to be permanent, but of course
I must retain the power of closing it if, and when,
I shall see fit. Its permanence must be contingent
on my life. I have no power of providing for
any one after my death,
Yours truly,
Jemima Stanbury.
I hope the young lady does not have any false hair
about her.’
When this note was received at Nuncombe Putney the
amazement which it occasioned was extreme. Mrs
Stanbury, the widow of the late vicar, lived in a
little morsel of a cottage on the outskirts of the
village, with her two daughters, Priscilla and Dorothy.
Their whole income, out of which it was necessary
that they should pay rent for their cottage, was less
than 70 pounds per annum. During the last few
months a five-pound note now and again had found its
way to Nuncombe Putney out of the coffers of the ‘D.
R.’; but the ladies there were most unwilling
to be so relieved, thinking that their brother’s
career was of infinitely more importance than their
comforts or even than their living. They were
very poor, but they were accustomed to poverty.
The elder sister was older than Hugh, but Dorothy,
