Scenes of Clerical Life

y different-looking buildin

nvinced, no lichen will ever again effect a settlement on-they are smooth and innutrient as the summit of the Rev. Amos Barton's head, after ten years of baldness and supererogatory soap. Pass through the baize doors and you will see the nave filled with well-shaped benches, understood to be free seats; while in certain eligible corners, less directly under the fire of the clergyman's eye, there are pews reserved for the

y is everywhere giving place to spick-and-span new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans, elevations, and sections, but alas! no picture. Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the depar

e than into each other's eyes. No low partitions allowing you, with a dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to see everything at all moments; but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank with a sense of retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity my burst into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand up on the seat during the psalms or the singing. And the singing was no mechanical affair of official routine; it had a drama. As the moment of psalmody approached, by some process to me as mysterious and untraceable as the opening of the flowers or the breaking-out of the stars, a slate appeared in front of the gallery, advertising in bold characters the psalm about to be sung, lest the sonorous announcement of the clerk should still leave the bucolic mind in doubt on that head. Then followed the migration of the clerk to the gallery, where, in company with a bassoon, two key-bugles, a carpenter understood to have an a

er Mr. Gilfil had departed this life-until after an interval in which Evangelicalism and the Catholic Question had begun to agitate the rustic mind with controversial debates. A Popish blacksmith had produced a strong Protestant reaction by declaring that, as soon as the Emancipation Bill was passed, he should do a great stroke of business in gridirons; and the disinclination of the Shepperton parishioners generally to di

. And now, pray, can you solve me the following problem? Given a man with a wife and six children: let him be obliged always to exhibit himself when outside his own door in a suit of black broadcloth, such as will not undermine the foundations of the Establishment by a paltry plebeian glossiness or an unseemly whiteness at the edges; in a snowy cravat, which is a serious investment of labour in the hemming, starching, and ironing departments; and in a hat which shows no symptom of taking to the hideous doctrine of expediency, and shaping itself according to circumstances; let him have a parish large enough to create an ext

wealth, through all sorts of 'bad times', on the farm of which she had been sole tenant since her husband's death, her epigrammatic neighbour, Mrs. Hackit, sarcastically accounted for by supposing that 'sixpences grew on the bents of Cross Farm;' while Mr. Hackit, expressing his views more literally, reminded his wife that 'money breeds money'. Mr. and Mrs. Hackit, from the neighbouring farm, are Mrs.

isten with an inviting succulence, and Mrs. Patten's niece, a single lady of fifty, who has refused the most ineligibl

ddition, and rasp your tongue with unmitigated bohea. You have a vague idea of a milch cow as probably a white-plaster animal standing in a butterman's window, and you know nothing of the sweet history of genuine cream, such as Miss Gibbs's: how it was this morning in the udders of the large sleek beasts, as they stood lowing a patient entreaty under the milking-shed; how it fell with a pleasant rhythm into Betty's pail, sending a delicious i

nning accompaniment to all her conversation, and in her utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend's self-satisfaction, she was never known to spoil a stocking. Mrs. Patten does not admire this excessive click-clicking activity. Quiescence in an easy-chair, under the sense of compound interest perpetually accumulating, has long seemed an ample function to her, and she does her malevolence gently. She is a pretty little old woman of eighty, with a close cap and tiny flat white curls round her face, as natty and unsoiled a

ople. Mr. Hackit is a shrewd substantial man, whose advice about crops is

-party, while it is freezing with February bitterness

was at Jim Hood's, the bassoon-man's, this morning, attending his wife, and he swears he'll be revenged on the pars

o 'the cups that cheer but not inebriate', and had already finished his tea; 'they began to sing the wedding psalm for a new-married couple, as pretty a psalm an' as pretty a tune as any in t

happy th

ful for

to dwell

hip and

' hymns, and a sort o' music

cences to narrative, 'he called out Silence! did he? when he got into

turned as red as a turkey-cock. I often say, when he preaches about meekness, h

ntly settled in Shepperton; and because, being himself a dabbler in drugs, he had the credit of having cured a patient of Mr. Pilgrim's. 'They say his

, without ever sticking fast a minute. There was one clever chap, I remember, as used to say, "You're like the woodpigeon; it says do, do, do all day, and never sets about any work itself." That's bringing it home to people. But our parson's no gift at all that way; he can preach as good a sermon as n

it, I've never been a sinner. From the fust beginning, when I went into service, I al'ys did my duty by my emplyers. I was a good wife as any in the county-never aggravated my husband. The cheese-factor used to say my cheese was al'ys to be depended on. I've known women, as their cheeses swelled a shame to be seen, when their husbands had counted on the cheese-money

m more for the glory of God than by giving a heavy subscription towards the rebuilding of Shepperton Church-a practical precept which was not likely to smooth the way to her acceptance of his theological doctrine. Mr. Hackit, who had more doc

g till we'd made up the sum, and, for my part, I think the congregation's fell off o' late; though Mr. Barton says that's because there's been no room for the p

ot overburthen'd i' th' upper storey; and his wife's as nice a lady-like woman as I'd wish to see. How nice she keeps her children! and little enough money to do't with; and a delicate creatur'-six children, an

-and-water, when he comes into supper after his cottage preaching. The parson lik

a was cleared away; for in bucolic society five-and-twenty years ago, the human animal of the male sex was understo

Parson Ely the other day, and he doesn't approve of it at all. He said it did as much harm as good to give a too familiar aspec

ceived the pith of his argument or the point of his joke, he mouthed out his words with slow emphasis; as a hen, when advertising her accouchement, passes at irregular intervals from pianissimo semiquavers to

t's better than never hearing anything good from week's end to week's end. And there's that Track Society's as Mr. Barton has begun-I've seen more o' the poor people with going tracking, than all the time I

of a guinea-pig, which were always with him the sign of suppressed disapproval. But he never contradicted Mrs. Hackit-a woman

ual disapprobation, and had n

house in all weathers, wet or dry, and coming in with their petticoats dagged and their shoes all over mud. Janet wanted to join in the tracking, but I told her I'd

inine mind with a jocose compliment, 'you held your petticoats so high, t

only tight in the sense of looking extremely squeezed by her boots. But Janet seemed

lp brew'; whereupon Mrs. Hackit replied that she had always thought Betty false; and Mrs. Patten said there was no bacon stolen when she was able to manage. Mr. Hackit, who often complained that he 'never saw the like to women with their maids-he never had any trouble with his men', avoided listening to this discussion, by raising the question of vetc