ghtened day,
silenced, but still a shade of regret will be mingled with their
dismissal, if only for the sake of the large stock of amusing anecdotes
which their names recall.

My earliest recollections are connected with old Russell[93], my
father's clerk. He was a little man but possessed of a consequential
manner sufficient for a giant. A shoemaker by trade, his real element
was in the church. His conversation was embellished by high-flown
grandiloquence, and he invariably walked upon the heels of his boots.
This latter peculiarity, as may well be imagined, was the cause of a
most comical effect whenever he had occasion to leave his seat and
clatter down the aisle of the church. How often when a boy did I make my
old nurse's sides shake with laughter by imitating old Russell's walk!
His manner of reading the responses in the service can only be compared
to a kind of bellow--as my father used to say, "he bellowed like a
calf"--and his rendering of parts of it was calculated to raise a smile
upon the lips of the most devout. The following are a few instances of
his perversions of the text. "Leviathan" under his quaint manipulation
became "leather thing," his trade of shoemaker helping him, no doubt, to
his interpretation. Whether he had ever attended a fish-dinner at
Greenwich and his mind had thus become impressed with the number and
variety of the inhabitants of the deep, history does not record, but, be
that as it may, "Bring hither the tabret" was invariably read as "Bring
hither the turbot." "Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego" did service for
"Ananias, Azarias, and Misael" in the "Benedicite," and "Destructions
are come to a perpetual end" was transmogrified into "_parental_ end" in
the ninth Psalm. My father once took the trouble to point out and try to
correct some of his inaccuracies, but he never attempted it again. Old
Russell listened attentively and respectfully, but when the lecture was
over he dismissed the subject with a superior shake of the head and the
disdainful remark, "Well, sir, I have heerd tell of people who think
with you." Never a bit though did he make any change in his own peculiar
rendering of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer.

[Footnote 93: Old Russell, for many years clerk of the parish of East
Lavant in the county of Sussex.]

There was one occasion on which he especially distinguished himself, and
I shall never forget it. A farmyard of six outbuildings abutted upon the
church burial