y honest
clergyman. For, on the very first bench, these were the faces on which
his eye had to rest, watching whether there was any stirring under the
stagnant surface.

Right in front of him--probably because he was stone-deaf, and it was
deemed more edifying to hear nothing at a short distance than at a long
one--sat 'Old Maxum', as he was familiarly called, his real patronymic
remaining a mystery to most persons. A fine philological sense discerns
in this cognomen an indication that the pauper patriarch had once been
considered pithy and sententious in his speech; but now the weight of
ninety-five years lay heavy on his tongue as well as in his ears, and he
sat before the clergyman with protruded chin, and munching mouth, and
eyes that seemed to look at emptiness.

Next to him sat Poll Fodge--known to the magistracy of her county as Mary
Higgins--a one-eyed woman, with a scarred and seamy face, the most
notorious rebel in the workhouse, said to have once thrown her broth over
the master's coat-tails, and who, in spite of nature's apparent
safeguards against that contingency, had contributed to the perpetuation
of the Fodge characteristics in the person of a small boy, who was
behaving naughtily on one of the back benches. Miss Fodge fixed her one
sore eye on Mr. Barton with a sort of hardy defiance.

Beyond this member of the softer sex, at the end of the bench, sat 'Silly
Jim', a young man afflicted with hydrocephalus, who rolled his head from
side to side, and gazed at the point of his nose. These were the
supporters of Old Maxum on his right.

On his left sat Mr. Fitchett, a tall fellow, who had once been a footman
in the Oldinport family, and in that giddy elevation had enunciated a
contemptuous opinion of boiled beef, which had been traditionally handed
down in Shepperton as the direct cause of his ultimate reduction to
pauper commons. His calves were now shrunken, and his hair was grey
without the aid of powder; but he still carried his chin as if he were
conscious of a stiff cravat; he set his dilapidated hat on with a knowing
inclination towards the left ear; and when he was on field-work, he
carted and uncarted the manure with a sort of flunkey grace, the ghost of
that jaunty demeanour with which he used to usher in my lady's morning
visitors. The flunkey nature was nowhere completely subdued but in his
stomach, and he still divided society into gentry, gentry's flunkeys, and
the people who provided for