th a nosegay in his hand, and a
gay-coloured flower stuck in a button-hole. He goes quite unconscious of
my floral satire.

The village clergyman and the village doctor are great friends of mine;
they come to visit me often, and smoke a pipe with me in my garden. The
twain love and respect each other, but they regard the world from
different points of view, and I am now and again made witness of a
good-humoured passage of arms. The clergyman is old, unmarried, and a
humorist. His sallies and his gentle eccentricities seldom provoke
laughter, but they are continually awakening the pleasantest smiles.
Perhaps what he has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, its
death-beds, its widows and orphans, has tamed his spirit, and put a
tenderness into his wit. I do not think I have ever encountered a man
who so adorns his sacred profession. His pious, devout nature produces
sermons just as naturally as my apple-trees produce apples. He is a tree
that flowers every Sunday. Very beautiful is his reverence for the Book,
his trust in it; through long acquaintance, its ideas have come to
colour his entire thought, and you come upon its phrases in his
ordinary speech. He is more himself in the pulpit than anywhere else,
and you get nearer him in his sermons than you do sitting with him at
his tea-table, or walking with him on the country roads. He does not
feel confined in his orthodoxy; in it he is free as a bird in the air.
The doctor is, I conceive, as good a Christian as the clergyman, but he
is impatient of pale or limit; he never comes to a fence without feeling
a desire to get over it. He is a great hunter of insects, and he thinks
that the wings of his butterflies might yield very excellent texts; he
is fond of geology, and cannot, especially when he is in the company of
the clergyman, resist the temptation of hurling a fossil at Moses. He
wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her ribbons--to annoy if he
cannot subdue--and, when his purpose is served, he puts his scepticism
aside--as the coquette puts her ribbons. Great arguments arise between
them, and the doctor loses his field through his loss of temper, which,
however, he regains before any harm is done. For the worthy man is
irascible withal, and opposition draws fire from him.

TWO OLD GENTLEMEN
[Sidenote: _H.B._]

Old Joe, who has been a pirate, a buffalo-hunter, a soldier, a
pastrycook, and a seller of bootlaces, collar-studs, and tie-clips in
the London g