An Act in a Backwater by E.F. Benson — Read

Jack Collingwood came to pay his expected visit to Wroxton early in September, as soon as his father and mother were back from their annual trip to the English Lakes. Canon Collingwood had much enjoyed their time there, and had brought back several tin boxes full of roots of wild marsh-growing plants which he intended to cultivate on the edge of the chalk-stream which ran at the bottom of the garden. He did this every year, and the plants never grew, which did not in the least stand in the way of his doing it again. He had also, as usual, preached an old sermon in Grasmere church, and had written three new ones. His life, indeed, at the Lakes was not less regular than his life at Wroxton; he had been out of doors more and had spent only two hours a day over the study of patristic literature, but he had been out at the same hours, and in at the same hours, and was quite unaltered.

He had worn the same straw-hat at the Lakes that he always wore, and on returning home put it on the top shelf of his mahogany wardrobe, where it reposed for eleven months out of the twelve.