for many weeks.  The February thaw set in early and the March winds began to blow before February was fairly out.  Nat Barker the octogenarian cripple, who had the reputation of being a weather prophet, was understood to have said that the spring was “loike to be forrard t’year,” and the minds of the younger inhabitants were considerably relieved.  Not that Nat Barker’s prophecies were usually fulfilled; no one ever remembered them at the time when they might have been verified.  But they were always made at the season when people had nothing to do but to talk about them.  Mr. Thomas Reid, the conservative sexton, turned up his nose at them, and said he “wished Nat Barker had to dig a parish depth grave in three hours without a drop of nothin’ to wet his pipe with, and if he didden fine that groun’ oncommon owdacious Thomas Reid he didden know.  They didden know nothin’, sir, them parish cripples.”  Wherewith the worthy sexton took his way with a battered tin can to get his “fours” at the Feathers.  He did not patronise the Duke’s Head.  It was too new-fangled for him, and he suspected his arch enemy, Mr. Abraham Boosey, of putting a rat or two into the old beer to make it “draw,” which accounted for its being so “hard.”  But Mr. Abraham Boosey was the undertaker, and he, Thomas Reid, was the sexton, and it did not do to express these views too loudly, lest perchance Mr. Boosey should, just in his play, construct a coffin or two just too big for the regulation grave, and thereby leave Mr. Reid in the lurch.  For the undertaker and the gravedigger are as necessary to each other, as Mr. Reid maintained, as a pair of blackbirds in a hedge.

But the spring was “forrard t’year” and the weather was consequently even more detestable than usual at that season.  The roads were heavy.  The rain seemed never weary of pouring down and the wind never tired of blowing.  The wet and leafless creepers beat against the walls of the cottage, and the chimneys smoked both there and at the vicarage.  The rooms were pervaded with a disagreeable smell of damp coal smoke, and the fires struggled desperately to burn against the overwhelming odds of rain and wind which came down the chimneys.  Mrs. Goddard never remembered to have been so uncomfortable during the two previous winters she had spent in Billingsfield, and even Nellie grew impatient and petulant.  The only bright spot in those long days seemed to be made by the regular visits of Mr. Juxon, by the equally regular bi-weekly appearance of the Ambroses when they came to tea, and by the little dinners at the vicarage.  The weather had grown so wet and the roads so bad that on these latter occasions the vicar sent his dogcart with Reynolds and the old mare, Strawberry, to fetch his two guests.  Even Mr. Juxon, who always walked when he could, had got into the habit of driving down to the cottage in a strange-looking gig which he had imported from America, and which, among all the many possessions of the squire, alone attracted the unfavourable comment of his butler.  He would have preferred to see a good English dogcart, high in the seat and wheels, at the door of the Hall, instead of that outlandish vehicle; but Joseph Ruggles, the groom, explained to him that it was easier to clean than a dogcart, and that when it rained he sat inside with the squire.