terrupted my father. "Contentus peragis!"

During the latter part of this dialogue, Blanche had sewn together three
quires of the best Bath paper, and she now placed them on a little table
before me, with her own inkstand and steel pen.

My mother put her finger to her lip, and said, "Hush!" my father
returned to the cradle of the AEsas; Captain Roland leaned his cheek on
his hand, and gazed abstractedly on the fire; Mr. Squills fell into a
placid doze; and, after three sighs that would have melted a heart of
stone, I rushed into--MY NOVEL.

CHAPTER II.

"There has never been occasion to use them since I've been in the
parish," said Parson Dale.

"What does that prove?" quoth the squire, sharply, and looking the
parson full in the face.

"Prove!" repeated Mr. Dale, with a smile of benign, yet too conscious
superiority, "what does experience prove?"

"That your forefathers were great blockheads, and that their descendant
is not a whit the wiser."

"Squire," replied the parson, "although that is a melancholy conclusion,
yet if you mean it to apply universally, and not to the family of the
Dales in particular; it is not one which my candour as a reasoner, and
my humility as a mortal, will permit me to challenge."

"I defy you," said Mr. Hazeldean, triumphantly. "But to stick to the
subject (which it is monstrous hard to do when one talks with a parson),
I only just ask you to look yonder, and tell me on your conscience--I
don't even say as a parson, but as a parishioner--whether you ever saw a
more disreputable spectacle?"

While he spoke, the squire, leaning heavily on the parson's left
shoulder, extended his cane in a line parallel with the right eye of
that disputatious ecclesiastic, so that he might guide the organ of
sight to the object he had thus unflatteringly described.

"I confess," said the parson, "that, regarded by the eye of the senses,
it is a thing that in its best day had small pretensions to beauty, and
is not elevated into the picturesque even by neglect and decay. But, my
friend, regarded by the eye of the inner man,--of the rural philosopher
and parochial legislator,--I say it is by neglect and decay that it
is rendered a very pleasing feature in what I may call 'the moral
topography of a parish.'"

The squire looked at the parson as if he could have beaten him; and,
indeed, regarding the object in dispute not only with the eye of the
outer man, but the eye of law and order, the ey