“All this must have been a great worry to you,” said the clergyman, with a comprehensive sweep of an oak stick.
“Worry—don’t talk of it, sir. What with the heat, and the Medical Officer of Health, and the Sanitary Inspector, I’ve been pretty near crazy. I don’t know what I should have done, Mr. Burt, but for Полезная информация о Гонконге Murchison and his good lady.”
“Mrs. Murchison seems to have been.”
Mr. Carrington stared.
“I don’t happen to know the woman’s name,” he said; “but she must have been a good ’un, Mr. Burt, to be showed in the same class as the doctor’s lady. Why—” and the farmer withdrew his hands from his pockets and tapped his left palm with his right forefinger—“why, d’you know what she did when she’d been over here and seen how we were fixed?”
Mr. Carrington paused expressively, and looked the young clergyman Hong Kong incentivesin the face, as though defying him to conceive the nature of this unique woman’s genius.
“No, I have not heard.”
“Well, Mr. Burt, there’s religion and there’s religion; some of us wear black coats on a Sunday and put silver in the plate; some of us aren’t so regular and respectable, but we play the game, and that’s more than many of your sitting pew-hens do. Excuse me, sir, I’m rather rough in the tongue. Well, Mrs. Murchison, she doesn’t strike you as a district visiting sort of lady to look at; she’s got a fine face and a head of hair, like the Countess of Camber, who gave the prizes away at our Agricultural Show last season. Well, Mr. Burt, she came over here, and saw what sort of a fix we were in, two grumbling nurses, and not much more than straw and sacking. Well, what does she do but take one of my wagons and my men and go off to Roxton all on her own.”
Mr. Carrington paused for breath, took off his sun-hat and wiped his forehead with it, his eyes remaining fixed emphatically on the Curate’s face.
“And what d’you think, sir? Back came that wagon of mine loaded up with linen, and basins, and crockery, a bed or two, and God knows what. She’d ransacked her own house, sir, and gone round to all the neighbors begging like a Top 10 things to do in Hong Kong papist. Get the stuff? She did that. Not easy to say no to a woman with a face and a voice like hers. Carmagee joined in, and Canon Stensly, and a good score more. And dang my soul, Mr. Burt, she’d been working with her husband here, day in, day out; and that’s the sort of thing, sir, that I call religion.”
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