“It’s a rotten shame,” he would begin, as he burst into the workshop and turned up the tails of his frock coat to keep them from contact with the customers’ chair. “It’s a rotten shame” was the beginning of most of his conversations. It was a rotten shame that cottage roofs should leak, that children living on farms should not know the taste of fresh milk, that wells should be in use of which the water was contaminated, or that families should have to sleep eight in a room.

Uncle Tom was just as sorry about it all as he was; but he was not so angry; though Laura did once hear him say that something they were talking about was damnable. “You take things too hard,” Laura once heard him say. “You fret, and it’s no good fretting. You can only do what you can, and God knows you’re doing your full share. Things’ll be better in time. You mark my words, they will. They’re better already: you should have seen Spittals’ Alley when I was a boy!” And when the young man had taken down his top hat from the shelf which was kept covered with clean paper for its reception, and jammed it down on his head and gone out, still declaring that it was a rotten shame, her uncle said, perhaps to her, perhaps to himself: “That young fellow-me-lad’s going to make a big stir in the world, or else he’s going to build up a fat practice, marry and settle down, and I don’t know which to wish for him.”

It was the young doctor who named Laura “the mouse”. “Hullo, Mouse!” he would say if he happened to notice her. That seldom happened, for he had no eye for plain little girls with books on their knees, unless they were ill or hungry. When one of her pretty cousins burst in at the door, her healthy high spirits stirring the air like a breeze, his face lit up, for she was the type of what he believed all children would be, if they could be properly fed and cared for.

Excepting the doctor, none of those known as Uncle Tom’s “queer fish” seemed to have any work to do or business to attend to, and, excepting Miss Connie, none of them were Candleford people. Some were regular visitors to farmhouses where boarders were taken; others were staying for the fishing at village inns, or had their own homes in one of the surrounding villages. Uncle Tom’s chief friend among them, a Mr. Mostyn, took a furnished cottage outside the town every summer. How they had first become acquainted, Laura never heard, but by the time of her regular visits to Candleford he was a frequent visitor.