Nevertheless, I think that this incident bore fruit later, and taught
me to consider whether it might not be better to spare than to kill;
better not only for the animal spared, but for the soul.
And the woman who did this unusual thing and in doing it unknowingly
dropped a minute seed into a boy's mind, who was she? Perhaps it would
be as well to give a brief account of her, although I thought that I
had finished with the subject of our neighbours. She and her husband,
a man named Matthew Blake, were our second nearest English neighbours,
but they lived a good deal further than the Royds and were seldom
visited by us. To me there was nothing interesting in them and their
surroundings, as they had no family and no people but the native peons
about them, and, above all, no plantation where birds could be seen.
They were typical English people of the lower middle class, who read
no books and conversed, with considerable misuse of the aspirate,
about nothing but their own and their neighbours' affairs. Physically
Mr. Blake was a very big man, being six feet three in height and
powerfully built. He had a round ruddy face, clean-shaved except for a
pair of side-whiskers, and pale-blue shallow eyes. He was invariably
dressed in black cloth, his garments being home-made and too large for
him, the baggy trousers thrust into his long boots.
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