erspiration. After all these labours you will easily conceive that he
was considerably exhausted by half-past nine o'clock in the evening, and
that a supper at a friendly parishioner's, with a glass, or even two
glasses, of brandy-and-water after it, was a welcome reinforcement. Mr.
Barton was not at all an ascetic; he thought the benefits of fasting were
entirely confined to the Old Testament dispensation; he was fond of
relaxing himself with a little gossip; indeed, Miss Bond, and other
ladies of enthusiastic views, sometimes regretted that Mr. Barton did not
more uninterruptedly exhibit a superiority to the things of the flesh.
Thin ladies, who take little exercise, and whose livers are not strong
enough to bear stimulants, are so extremely critical about one's personal
habits! And, after all, the Rev. Amos never came near the borders of a
vice. His very faults were middling--he was not _very_ ungrammatical. It
was not in his nature to be superlative in anything; unless, indeed, he
was superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity. If
there was any one point on which he showed an inclination to be
excessive, it was confidence in his own shrewdness and ability in
practical matters, so that he was very full of plans which were something
like his moves in chess--admirably well calculated, supposing the state
of the case were otherwise. For example, that notable plan of introducing
anti-dissenting books into his Lending Library did not in the least
appear to have bruised the head of Dissent, though it had certainly made
Dissent strongly inclined to bite the Rev. Amos's heel. Again, he vexed
the souls of his churchwardens and influential parishioners by his
fertile suggestiveness as to what it would be well for them to do in the
matter of the church repairs, and other ecclesiastical secularities.

'I never saw the like to parsons,' Mr. Hackit said one day in
conversation with his brother churchwarden, Mr. Bond; 'they're al'ys for
meddling with business, an they know no more about it than my black
filly.'

'Ah,' said Mr. Bond, 'they're too high learnt to have much common-sense.'

'Well,' remarked Mr. Hackit, in a modest and dubious tone, as if throwing
out a hypothesis which might be considered bold, 'I should say that's a
bad sort of eddication as makes folks onreasonable.'

So that, you perceive, Mr. Barton's popularity was in that precarious
condition, in that toppling and contingent state, in which