 but only such as had had their throats cut and been allowed to bleed. St.
Paul and the church of Jerusalem had insisted upon it as necessary that even
Gentile converts should abstain from things strangled and from blood, and they
had joined this prohibition with that of a vice about the abominable nature of
which there could be no question; it would be well therefore to abstain in
future and see whether any noteworthy spiritual result ensued. She did abstain,
and was certain that from the day of her resolve she had felt stronger, purer in
heart, and in all respects more spiritually minded than she had ever felt
hitherto. Theobald did not lay so much stress on this as she did, but as she
settled what he should have at dinner she could take care that he got no
strangled fowls; as for black puddings, happily he had seen them made when he
was a boy and had never got over his aversion for them. She wished the matter
were one of more general observance than it was; this was just a case in which
as Lady Winchester she might have been able to do what as plain Mrs. Pontifex it
was hopeless even to attempt.
    And thus this worthy couple jogged on from month to month and from year to
year. The reader, if he has passed middle life and has a clerical connection,
will probably remember scores and scores of rectors and rectors' wives who
differed in no material respect from Theobald and Christina. Speaking from a
recollection and experience extending over nearly eighty years from the time
when I was myself a child in the nursery of a vicarage, I should say I had drawn
the better rather [than] the worse side of the life of an English country parson
of some fifty years ago. I admit however that there are no such people to be
found nowadays. A more united or on the whole happier couple could not have been
found in England. One grief only overshadowed the early years of their married
life, I mean the fact that no living children were born to them.
 

                                    Part II

                                   Chapter 17

In the course of time this sorrow was removed. At the beginning of the fifth
year of her married life Mrs. Theobald was safely delivered of a boy. This was
on the sixth of September 1835.
    Word was immediately sent to old Mr. Pontifex, who received the news with
real pleasure. His son John's wife had borne daughters only, and he was
seriously uneasy lest there should be a failure in the male line of his
descendants. The good news therefore was doubly welcome and caused as much
delight at Elmhurst, as dismay in Woburn
