four
o’clock
Basset had a poor soil , poor roads , a poor non-resident landlord , a poor non-resident vicar , and rather less than half a curate , also poor . If any one strongly impressed with the power of the human mind to triumph over circumstances will contend that the parishioners of Basset might nevertheless have been a very superior class of people , I have nothing to urge against that abstract proposition ; I only know that , in point of fact , the Basset mind was in strict keeping with its circumstances . The muddy lanes , green or clayey , that seemed to the unaccustomed eye to lead nowhere but into each other , did really lead , with patience , to a distant high-road ; but there were many feet in Basset which they led more frequently to a centre of dissipation , spoken of formerly as the `` Markis o ' Granby , '' but among intimates as `` Dickison 's . '' A large low room with a sanded floor ; a cold scent of tobacco , modified by undetected beer-dregs ; Mr Dickison leaning against the door-post with a melancholy pimpled face , looking as irrelevant to the daylight as a last night 's guttered candle , -- all this may not seem a very seductive form of temptation ; but the majority of men in Basset found it fatally alluring when encountered on their road toward four o'clock on a wintry afternoon ; and if any wife in Basset wished to indicate that her husband was not a pleasure-seeking man , she could hardly do it more emphatically than by saying that he did n't spend a shilling at Dickison 's from one Whitsuntide to another . Mrs Moss had said so of _ her _ husband more than once , when her brother was in a mood to find fault with him , as he certainly was to-day . And nothing could be less pacifying to Mr Tulliver than the behaviour of the farmyard gate , which he no sooner attempted to push open with his riding-stick than it acted as gates without the upper hinge are known to do , to the peril of shins , whether equine or human . He was about to get down and lead his horse through the damp dirt of the hollow farmyard , shadowed drearily by the large half-timbered buildings , up to the long line of tumble-down dwelling-houses standing on a raised causeway ; but the timely appearance of a cowboy saved him that frustration of a plan he had determined on , -- namely , not to get down from his horse during this visit .