Not only has Mr Booth observed accurately and with the eye of an artist this corner of East Yorkshire scenery, but he has made himself complete master of the vernacular.
"''Ev ye 'eard 'ow Mester Jenkison' mother' sister-in-law's gettin' on, Steg?'
"'She is that!' says Steg, warming with a sense of triumph to the work, as though he had the credit of her demise. 'She deed ti morn at aif-past six.'
"'Nay, bud it weean't. Wensday. There's ower much thunder about for keepin'.'"
A man who can make his yokels talk like this has got little to learn.
In Father Mostyn Mr Booth has created one of the most glorious parsons in fiction.
"'Ha! The vicar's lobster if you please. Not out of the window there; I won't have lobster out of the window. The sunlight has a peculiar chemical action upon the tin, liberating certain constituents of the metal exceedingly perilous to the intercostal linings.'"
Nothing that goes on in the village is hidden from him, so we see him at once making friends with the Spawer, the stranger who comes to Cliff-End to compose his music in quiet. "The house stands endwise to the sea, set deep in a horse-shoe of trees; a big, hearty, whitewashed building under bronze-red tiles; two storeys high in front, that slope down backward over the dairy toward the stack-garth till they touch its high nettles.... The kitchen takes up the whole end of the house, facing two ways. The first window watches the lane across the red tile path and the little unclassified garden; the second comes on to the broadside front of the house, facing south, where the sun is a gorgeous nuisance after mid-morning in summer, ... dipping below the sunk stone wall and the dry nettle-grown ditch in which the ball buries itself instinctively whenever you hit it, is the big grass field for cricket, with the wickets always standing. And beyond this, sweeping away in every direction ... go the great lagoons of corn, brimming up to their green confines ... and the dim Garthstone windmill turning its listless sails over in dreamy soliloquy across three miles of fattening grain and green hedge and buttercupped pasture ... and the celestial sound of the sea, two fields off, tipping the lonely shore ... and the stirring of lazy leaves, the chick of poultry, the soothing grunt of distant pigs ... the solaceful shutting of unseen gates...."