the corners of his roughly-cut mouth: a man, you observe,
who has most likely sprung from the harder-working section of the middle
class, and has hereditary sympathies with the checkered life of the
people. He gets together the working men in his parish on a Monday
evening, and gives them a sort of conversational lecture on useful
practical matters, telling them stories, or reading some select passages
from an agreeable book, and commenting on them; and if you were to ask
the first labourer or artisan in Tripplegate what sort of man the parson
was, he would say,--'a uncommon knowin', sensable, free-spoken gentleman;
very kind an' good-natur'd too'. Yet for all this, he is perhaps the best
Grecian of the party, if we except Mr. Baird, the young man on his left.

Mr. Baird has since gained considerable celebrity as an original writer
and metropolitan lecturer, but at that time he used to preach in a little
church something like a barn, to a congregation consisting of three rich
farmers and their servants, about fifteen labourers, and the due
proportion of women and children. The rich farmers understood him to be
'very high learnt;' but if you had interrogated them for a more precise
description, they would have said that he was 'a thinnish-faced man, with
a sort o' cast in his eye, like'.

Seven, altogether: a delightful number for a dinner-party, supposing the
units to be delightful, but everything depends on that. During dinner Mr.
Fellowes took the lead in the conversation, which set strongly in the
direction of mangold-wurzel and the rotation of crops; for Mr. Fellowes
and Mr. Cleves cultivated their own glebes. Mr. Ely, too, had some
agricultural notions, and even the Rev. Archibald Duke was made alive to
that class of mundane subjects by the possession of some potato-ground.
The two young curates talked a little aside during these discussions,
which had imperfect interest for their unbeneficed minds; and the
transcendental and near-sighted Mr. Baird seemed to listen somewhat
abstractedly, knowing little more of potatoes and mangold-wurzel than
that they were some form of the 'Conditioned'.

'What a hobby farming is with Lord Watling!' said Mr. Fellowes, when the
cloth was being drawn. 'I went over his farm at Tetterley with him last
summer. It is really a model farm; first-rate dairy, grazing and wheat
land, and such splendid farm-buildings! An expensive hobby, though. He
sinks a good deal of money there, I fancy.