The potatoes failed, and did not pay for the digging; the currant bushes were blighted; the strawberries were eaten by snails, and, of course, no asparagus could be cut for three years; a little item, this last, quite overlooked.  The pigs returned exactly the sum spent upon them; there was neither profit nor loss, and there did not appear any chance of making a fortune out of pork.  The lady had to abandon the experiment quite disheartened, and found that, after all her care and energy, her books showed a loss of fifteen pounds.  It was wonderful it was not more; labour was so expensive, and no doubt she was cheated right and left.

She next tried to utilise her natural abilities, and to turn her accomplishments to account.  She painted; she illuminated texts; she undertook difficult needlework of various kinds, in answer to advertisements which promised ample remuneration for a few hours’ labour.  Fifteen hours’ hard work she found was worth just threepence, and the materials cost one shilling:  consequently she laboriously worked herself poorer by ninepence.

Finally, she was studying bees, which really seemed to hold out some prospect of success.  Yonder were the hills where they could find thyme in abundance; the fields around supplied clover; and the meadows below were full of flowers.  So that hot summer day, under the weeping ash, she was deep in the study of the ‘Ligurian queen,’ the ‘super’ system, the mysteries of ‘driving,’ and making sketches of patent hives.  Looking up from her sketch she saw that her husband had fallen asleep, and stayed to gaze at him thoughtfully.

He looked worn, and older than he really was; as if rest or change would do him good; as if he required luxuries and petting.  She sighed, and wondered whether the bees would enable her to buy him such things, for though the house was well furnished and apparently surrounded with wealth, they were extremely poor.  Yet she did not care for money for their own household use so much as to give him the weight in parish affairs he so sadly needed.  She felt that he was pushed aside, treated as a cipher, and that he had little of the influence that properly belonged to him.  Her two daughters, their only children, were comfortably, though not grandly, married and settled; there was no family anxiety.  But the work, the parish, the people, all seemed to have slipped out of her husband’s hands.  She could not but acknowledge that he was too quiet and yielding, that he lacked the brazen voice, the personal force that imposes upon men.  But surely his good intentions, his way of life, his gentle kindness should carry sway.  Instead of which the parish seemed to have quite left the Church, and the parson was outside the real modern life of the village.  No matter what he did, even if popular, it soon seemed to pass out of his hands.