“There! Did you ever!” Mrs. Herring exclaimed. “I never saw such a lot of heathen Turks in my life! A woman I took good care barely to pass the time of day with when I lived here to come hail-fellow-well-metting me like that!”

“She didn’t mean any harm,” apologized Laura’s mother. “There’s so little going on here that when anybody does come the folks take more interest than they would in a town.”

“I’d interest her! I’d hail-fellow-well-met her!” exclaimed Mr. Herring, who had so far sat mute. “I’d teach her how to behave to her betters, if I had my way.”

“God knows I did my best to put them in their places when we were living here,” sighed Mrs. Herring, her anger subsiding, “but ‘twas no good. Why we ever thought to live in such a place I couldn’t tell you if you asked me, unless it was that the house was going cheap at the time Mr. Herring retired and a nice bit of ground went with it. It’s very different at Candleford. Of course, there are poor people there, but we don’t have to associate with them; they keep to their part of the town and we keep to ours. You should see our house: nice iron railings in front and an entry where the stairs go up, not like this, with the door opening straight out on the path and anybody right on top of you before you know where you are. Not but what this is a nice little house,” she added hastily, remembering that she owned it, “but you know what I mean. Candleford’s different. Civilized, that’s what my son-in-law calls it, and he works at the biggest grocer’s in the town, so he ought to know. It’s civilized, he says, and he’s right. You can’t call a place like this civilized, now can you?”

Laura thought it must be a fine thing to be civilized until, later, she asked her mother what the word meant and her mother replied: “A civilized place is where the people wear clothes and don’t run naked like savages.” So it meant nothing, for everybody in this country wore clothes. One old Lark Rise woman wore three flannel petticoats in winter. She thought that if all the Candleford people were like Mr. and Mrs. Herring she would not like them much. How rude they had been to poor Rachel!

But they were funny. When her father came home from work that night her mother told him about the visit, imitating first Mrs. Herring’s voice, then that of Mr. Herring, and making the one even more carefully genteel than it had been and the other more sudden and squeaky.