“Admiral Phelps, your churchwarden, is an excellent fellow,” said Mr. Birkett, “and kept the whole village going during the war. He commanded the Home Guard and pretty well everything else. Brown of the Red Lion is the other churchwarden, an excellent man too. In fact they are an extremely nice lot of people in Southbridge, and now the Mixo-Lydians have all gone back we can breathe again.”
The ex-Vicar’s aunt who had quite recovered herself, said she wished all the other foreigners would go home too.
“Oh, the Mixo-Lydians haven’t gone back to Mixo-Lydia,” said Mrs. Birkett, “only to London, where my niece who lives in Kensington says they are universally loathed. Most of them are applying for naturalization,” to which Everard Carter answered that he sometimes thought it was his duty, and
