And so, while Essex was at prayer, Will was concocting a furious Oriental epistle, demanding a clean envoy, if Jinny was too lazy to come herself. This was not so difficult to demand, though laziness seemed as unknown to the Hebrews as gloves. He had dallied, indeed, with his original idea of fetching the household parcels from Chipstone himself, but somehow he could not bring himself to so complete a severance of relations with Jinny, especially as after the appearance of Uncle Lilliwhyte in the new rôle of goods-deliverer, his mother had surprisingly suggested that to spare Methusalem’s legs, the old nondescript might always in future bring the weekly parcel for a penny or two. Will had put this suggestion emphatically aside—it would mean exposing his mother to a contact she detested—but he wound up his letter to Jinny by threatening to become his own carrier unless the service was conducted with propriety. Nip duly returned that same Sunday afternoon with the answer that if he would send his esteemed order in writing, Mr. Daniel Quarles would have pleasure in executing his commission through a scrupulously scoured ambassador. Will started replying instantly that it was not _his_ order: let her mark that he was not the householder, merely the “scribe.” To write out the order, however, gave him unexpected pause. Who could have realized that “parrafin,” “sope” and “shuggar” were alike unenjoyed by the heathen Jews? A pity that Frog Farm was itself so “flowing with milk and honey”: with what confidence he could have drawn on the resources of Palestine! True, one might dodge—lamps and oil were abundant enough in Judæa, and purification and sweetness could be suggested with airy allusiveness. But in the end he only wrote grandly, “Household order the same as uzual.”
Before this order had been executed, however, chance brought about a meeting. Not that Miss Gentry, near whose wayside cottage it occurred, would have called it chance. For that deft needlewoman, besides believing in her own stained-glass miracle, cherished, as we know, a naïve faith in “Culpeper’s Complete Herbal”—a faith doubtless sustained by the attacks on the Pope or on infidel physicians that might lurk snakelike in its most innocent-seeming herb. Under the stimulus of this elementally indelicate work—never permitted to stray from her bedside, though imparted in filtered form to Jinny—she would tie woody nightshade round her neck for her dizziness, and buy watercress from Uncle Lilliwhyte to wash away pimples with the juice. And if these herbs were, as Culpeper testified, under the respective governance of Mercury and the Moon, how much more so human life! Miss Gentry had indeed remarked to Will that very afternoon (when he at last brought his mother’s bonnet to be “bleached as good as new”) that her own horoscope, cast in infancy by her aunt, had shown that the first time she went upon a voyage she would be drowned: a reading whose infallibility her happy survival demonstrated, since she had never been foolish enough to set foot upon a vessel. “But for the deciphering of this horoscope,” she had pointed out, “I should surely now have been drowned, for I am naturally as fond of voyages as you.”