The changed conditions of the agreement deducted twelve shillings from the amount he was to receive for the year whilst burdening him with the additional expense of clothing Elizabeth. For exactly the same conditions of “cloathing” and for the identical period of time, Thomas Dan of Farleigh received £4.12.0d. along with Thomas Richard whilst William Baker of Waldron was allowed a sliding scale of payment that took account of any possible increases in the price of flour. Both Dan and Baker lived outside Chiddingly. It looks as though the Chiddingly Vestry could not find enough takers of its pauper children that year inside its own boundaries and had turned to Richard Lower as a last resort, but even then it was not prepared to throw money unnecessarily in the direction of Dissenting “outlanders”.

As far as Mary Lower was concerned, the parish politics connected with Elizabeth Deacon’s coming bothered her far less than the pleasing thought that now she would have someone to help with the housework and her three children. Poor Mary! When Elizabeth finally arrived, she had only two children. Alfred Ebenezer had died suddenly on March 11^th,1812.

Richard Lower recorded in his notebook how the next morning he stood looking down at his son’s corpse before the tiny coffin was carried along the muddy lane to Chiddingly churchyard, followed by a slow, shuffling cortege of fifty head-bowed children, mostly his own pupils. “An amiable and intelligent child who had a most delightful voice and sung extremely well,” wrote Richard. Suddenly, unexpectedly, just when it had seemed that Alfred Ebenezer had survived the terrors that threatened every young life in early-19^th century rural England, he had been snatched away. As Richard looked down, the lines of a poem formed in his mind:

Art thou unconscious, dear departed shade,
    Of those sensations now I feel for thee?
Say, dost thou know the wound that death has made
    In separating thee, my babe, from me?

Has thy bless’d spirit winged its airy road,
    Or art thou hov’ring o’er thy sorrowing sire?
An no, enraptured thou art now with God
    And ever there his boundless love admire.

Fain would I leave this world of sin and woe
    And mount aloft to meet thy Saviour there,
And with my babes would help to praise Him too
    In full fruition evermore to share.

In every day, in each distressing hour,
    All bounteous Lord, help me on thee to stay;
Thro’ life, in death, give me to feel thy power,
    Then reign with thee in everlasting day.

(The small “t’s” are in the original).