Simcoe and the honourable woman his wife.
Their efforts had thinned the very Ebenezer hard by them, which building
before Simcoe's advent used to be so full, that you could see the backs
of the congregation squeezing out of the arched windows thereof. Mr.
Simcoe's tracts fluttered into the doors of all the Doctor's cottages,
and were taken as greedily as honest Mrs. Portman's soup, with the
quality of which the graceless people found fault. With the folks at the
Ribbon Factory situated by the weir on the Brawl side, and round which
the Low Town had grown, Orthodoxy could make no way at all. Quiet Miss
Myra was put out of court by impetuous Mrs. Simcoe and her female
aides-de-camp. Ah, it was a hard burthen for the Doctor's lady to
bear, to behold her husband's congregation dwindling away; to give
the precedence on the few occasions when they met to a notorious
low-churchman's wife who was the daughter of an Irish Peer; to know that
there was a party in Clavering, their own town of Clavering, on which her
Doctor spent a great deal more than his professional income, who held him
up to odium because he played a rubber at whist; and pronounced him to be
a Heathen because he went to the play.
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