great grief, also a great surprise and discomfiture, to Deborah, who had married in calm opposition to all her relatives and fellow-religionists, because she admired Humphrey's stalwart form and honest English face and manly ways, and fully expected to add to these natural graces all those spiritual ones in which she so abundantly rejoiced. But, greatly to her astonishment, the good-tempered, placid fellow, so ready to yield to her in most matters, so impossible to quarrel with, although not hard to wound, developed in some few directions a will as immovable, as silent, and as positive as the Peak o Derby, in whose shadow it had its early growth. One of these directions was religious: Humphrey did not especially cling to the Church of England, wherein he had been bred, but he distinctly refused to belong to any other; and the only offensive weapon he ever used, in the discussions he could not always avoid with Deborah, was the Book of Common Prayer, which he sometimes brought out, and read aloud wherever it happened to open, in a sonorous voice, around and through whose diapason the wife's shrill and thin tones harmlessly wandered, like the twitter of sparrows around the organ of a cathedral.
Fancy, if you please, Deborah of Ramah's emotions if Lapidoth had declined all sympathy with Barak, and had quite refused to admire Jael, or to listen to his wife's song of triumph!
Another blank wall against which Dame Wilder presently ran her head was her husband's determination that Molly, the first and only child, should be
