t the candidate upon his examinations. Sometimes
he would shut him up in a small closet, telling him he must answer a
hundred and fifty questions, in plane and spherical trigonometry, within
as many minutes, and that he would be allowed the assistance of
Johnson's Dictionary, and the _Gradus ad Parnassum_, for the purpose. At
other tines he would ask the candidate, with a bland smile, what was his
opinion of things in general, and of the dispute between him (Jack) and
the Squire in particular; and if that question was not answered to his
satisfaction, he remitted him to his studies. When no objection could be
made to the man's parts, Jack would say that he had scruples of
conscience, because he doubted whether his commission had been fairly
come by, or whether he had not bribed the Squire by a five-pound note to
obtain it. At last he did not even take the trouble of going through
this farce, but would at once, if he disliked the look of the man's
face, tell him he was busy at the moment;--that he might lay the
Squire's letter on the table, and call again that day six months for an
answer. He no longer pretended, in fact, to any fairness or justice in
his dealings; for though those who sided with him might be guilty of all
the offences in the calendar, Jack continued to wink so hard, and shut
his ears so close, as not to see or hear of them; while as to the
unhappy wights who differed from him, he had the eyes of Argus and the
ear of Dionysius, and the tender mercies of a Spanish inquisitor,
discovering _scandalum magnatum_ and high treason in ballads which they
had written twenty years before, and in which Jack, though he received a
presentation copy at the time, had never pretended, up to that moment,
to detect the least harm.

The last of these freaks which I shall here mention took place on this
wise. Jack had never been accustomed to invite any one to his assemblies
but the ushers who had been appointed by the Squire, and it was always
understood that they alone had a vote in all vestry matters. But when
John quarrelled with his family, as above mentioned, and a large part of
the oldest and most respectable of his relatives drew off from him, it
occurred to Jack that he could bring in a set of new auxiliaries, upon
whose vote he could count in all his family squabbles, or his deputes,
with Squire Bull; and the following was the device he fell upon for that
end.

Here and there upon North Farm, where the village sch