Could I not be happy with her here, among these forgotten hills, these widely scattered homesteads?
Could I not be happy dissevered eternally from billiard-room and kursaal, race-ground and dancing-rooms?
Yes, completely and unreservedly happy--happy as a village curate with seventy pounds a year and a cast-off coat, supplied by the charity of a land too poor to pay its pastors the wage of a decent butler--happy as a struggling farmer, though the clay soil of my scanty acres were never so sour and stubborn, my landlord never so hard about his rent--happy as a pedlar, with my pack of cheap tawdry wares slung behind me, and my Charlotte tramping gaily by my side.
I breakfasted next morning in a snug little parlour behind the bar, where I overheard two carters conversing in the Carthaginian _patois_, to which I became hourly more accustomed.

My brisk cheery landlady came in and out while I took my meal; and whenever I could detain her long enough, I tried to engage her in conversation.
I asked her if she had ever heard the name of Meynell; and after profound consideration she replied in the negative.
"I don't mind hearing aught of folks called Meynell," she said with more or less of the _patois_, which I was beginning to understand; "but I haven't got mooch memory for nee-ams.

I might have heard o' such folks, and not minded t' nee-am." This was rather dispiriting; but I knew that if any record of Christian Meynell's daughter existed at Huxter's Cross, it was in my power to discover it.
I asked if there was any official in the way of a registrar to be found in the village; and found that there was no one more important than an old man who kept the keys of the church.

The registers were kept in the vestry, my landlady believed, and the old man was called Jonas Gorles, and lived half a mile off, at the homestead of his son-in-law.

But my landlady said she would send for him immediately, and pledged herself to produce him in the course of an hour.