In Wales, where a curate is frequently obliged to maintain a family upon a salary of less than twenty pounds a year, the lower order of clergy are generally under the necessity of stooping to less sacred employments than preaching, and frequently to manual labour itself, in order to increase their scanty pittance.
The reader, no doubt, has heard or read of instances-of this kind, where an honest, worthy curate has been compelled to go out a hedging or ditching for fourteenpence a day, whilst the rector, who makes his charge a perfect sinecure, spends a salary of three or four hundred pounds per annum in London, at the distance of nearly as many hundred miles from his flock, about whose welfare he is little, or rather, not solicitous. Peter Tuckle was a priest of the former class; his salary amounted to little better, so that having a wife and three small children to support, he was compelled either to hit upon some method of increasing his store, or else to sit down tamely and starve. Now the latter is at best but a very sorry and disagreeable business; Peter, therefore, very wisely resolved to have nothing to do with it if he could possibly help it; and accordingly, having a natural turn for the farming business, cultivated a little plot of ground, reared cabbages and potatoes, and kept fowls and geese; whilst his wife employed herself in spinning, knitting stockings, amp;c.
Peter found his farming turned to better account than his sacerdotal employments. He was enabled to send pullets and new laid eggs to market, and as the money came in, gradually added to his live as well as dead stock; so that in a few years Peter was enabled to take a larger farm, and not only augmented the number of his cocks and hens, but made likewise a purchase of a cow and a couple of goats, with sundry other valuable acquisitions. Now, there is an old Latin saying which observes that Sine Cerere et Baccho frigit Venus; which saying we will venture to reverse, by observing, that wherever the two former abound, Venus, instead of growing heavy and phlegmatic, is apt to grow wanton and rampageous.
Peter swigged in large supplies of Cornish ale, but his wife began to grow too exorbitant in her demands, and poor Peter found himself wholly inadequate to the measures of her wants.
One Sunday afternoon Peter, with his dame, sat regaling themselves over a mug of nut-brown ale, and looking out at the window at the cocks and hens that were strutting up and down the yard before Peter's house. Now Peter had lately purchased a bantam cock, that played the very devil with all the hens; no sooner down than up again; and in this manner he took them all one after the other, by turns.
"My dear," quoth Peter's wife, "do you observe what a notable cock this is for business?"
Peter made no reply, any further than by nodding his head, as he was at the time smoking his pipe.
"My dear," repeated his wife, "how is it that this cock can be so notable among the hens, and yet he has nothing to show for it? Pr'ythee, love, explain the matter to me.
"Our bantam-cock treads every hen.
The yard holds just a score and ten,
Yet still he romps with great and small.
Now it has perplex'd my brain,
And for my soul I can't make out,
How bantam brings the thing about,
Or how he treads the hens at all -
Will you, my dear, the cause explain?"
Peter was sorely put to it by this question from his wife.
However, after taking two or three whiffs of his pipe, he began a learned dissertation upon the organization of brute and human bodies; concluding with this observation-"Fowls, from the eagle to the wren, Are harnessed otherwise than men;
Within his own warm entrails pent,
This bantam keeps his what d'ye call?
His engine, which he plays withal.
Else it might chance be torn and rent
By ugly briars, thorns and brambles,
As through the fields and woods he rambles;
And 'tis by keeping it so warm
He can such feats of love perform."
Peter's wife listened to this physical explanation with great attention.
"If that be the case, my dear, I wish you would make use of your bowels for the like purpose."
Poor Peter shook his head at this speech, then clapping his hand upon his belly-"Indeed, dame, this belly of mine was made for other purposes — to be lined with roast pork, capon, and good ale; nor is there room in. it for a single wheat straw."
"Then let me provide you with room," replied his dame.
Peter arose and followed his wife into the bed-chamber.