with all
its sweet garden-scenes and fair perspectives overturned and thrust out
of sight.

In the second place, let me assure you that Mr. Gilfil's potations of
gin-and-water were quite moderate. His nose was not rubicund; on the
contrary, his white hair hung around a pale and venerable face. He drank
it chiefly, I believe, because it was cheap; and here I find myself
alighting on another of the Vicar's weaknesses, which, if I had cared to
paint a flattering portrait rather than a faithful one, I might have
chosen to suppress. It is undeniable that, as the years advanced, Mr.
Gilfil became, as Mr. Hackit observed, more and more 'close-fisted',
though the growing propensity showed itself rather in the parsimony of
his personal habits, than in withholding help from the needy. He was
saving--so he represented the matter to himself--for a nephew, the only
son of a sister who had been the dearest object, all but one, in his
life. 'The lad,' he thought, 'will have a nice little fortune to begin
life with, and will bring his pretty young wife some day to see the spot
where his old uncle lies. It will perhaps be all the better for his
hearth that mine was lonely.'

Mr. Gilfil was a bachelor, then?

That is the conclusion to which you would probably have come if you had
entered his sitting-room, where the bare tables, the large old-fashioned
horse-hair chairs, and the threadbare Turkey carpet perpetually fumigated
with tobacco, seemed to tell a story of wifeless existence that was
contradicted by no portrait, no piece of embroidery, no faded bit of
pretty triviality, hinting of taper-fingers and small feminine ambitions.
And it was here that Mr. Gilfil passed his evenings, seldom with other
society than that of Ponto, his old brown setter, who, stretched out at
full length on the rug with his nose between his fore-paws, would wrinkle
his brows and lift up his eyelids every now and then, to exchange a
glance of mutual understanding with his master. But there was a chamber
in Shepperton Vicarage which told a different story from that bare and
cheerless dining-room--a chamber never entered by any one besides Mr.
Gilfil and old Martha the housekeeper, who, with David her husband as
groom and gardener, formed the Vicar's entire establishment. The blinds
of this chamber were always down, except once a-quarter, when Martha
entered that she might air and clean it. She always asked Mr. Gilfil for
the key, which he kept locked up in