at the top of his house, disturbing the 'conjugal
endearments' of roosting fowl, and on a business the least spiritual
that can be imagined. By ancient usage throughout this sequestered
region, which is the Savoy of England (viz., Cumberland, Westmoreland,
and Furness) all accounts are settled annually at Candlemas, which means
the middle of February. From Christmas, therefore, to this period the
reverend pastor was employed in making out bills, receipts, leases and
releases, charges and discharges, wills and codicils to wills for most
of the hardworking householders amongst his flock. This work paid better
than spinning. By this night work, by the summer work of cutting peats
and mowing grass, by the autumnal work of reaping barley and oats, and
the early winter work of taking up potatoes, the reverend gentleman
could average seven shillings a day besides beer. But meantime our
spiritual friend was poaching on the manors of the following people--of
the chamber counsel, of the attorney, of the professional accountant, of
the printer and compositor, of the notary public, of the scrivener, and
sometimes, we fear, of the sheriff's officer in arranging for special
bail. These very uncanonical services one might have fancied sufficient,
with spinning and spelling, for filling up the temporal cares of any one
man's time. But this restless Proteus masqueraded through a score of
other characters--as seedsman, harvester, hedger and ditcher, etc. We
have no doubt that he would have taken a job of paving; he would have
contracted for darning old Christopher's silk stockings, or for a mile
of sewerage; or he would have contracted to dispose by night of the
sewage (which the careful reader must not confound with the sewerage,
that being the ship and the sewage the freight). But all this coarse
labour makes a man's hands horny, and, what is worse, the starvation,
or, at least, impoverishment, of his intellect makes his mind horny;
and, what is worst of all in a clergyman, who is stationed as a watchman
on a church-steeple expressly to warn all others against the
all-besetting danger of worldliness, such an incessant preoccupation of
the heart by coarse and petty cares makes the spiritual apprehensiveness
and every organ of spiritual sensibility more horny than the hoofs of a
rhinoceros.

Kindliness of heart, no doubt, remained to the last with Mr. Walker,
_that_ being secured by the universal spirit of brotherly and social
feeling am