int
where your spiritual interpretation begins. And Mr. Barton this morning
succeeded in carrying the pauper imagination to the dough-tub, but
unfortunately was not able to carry it upwards from that well-known
object to the unknown truths which it was intended to shadow forth.

Alas! a natural incapacity for teaching, finished by keeping 'terms' at
Cambridge, where there are able mathematicians, and butter is sold by the
yard, is not apparently the medium through which Christian doctrine will
distil as welcome dew on withered souls.

And so, while the sleet outside was turning to unquestionable snow, and
the stony dining-room looked darker and drearier, and Mr. Fitchett was
nodding his lowest, and Mr. Spratt was boxing the boys' ears with a
constant _rinforzando_, as he felt more keenly the approach of
dinner-time, Mr. Barton wound up his exhortation with something of the
February chill at his heart as well as his feet. Mr. Fitchett, thoroughly
roused now the instruction was at an end, obsequiously and gracefully
advanced to help Mr. Barton in putting on his cape, while Mrs. Brick
rubbed her withered forefinger round and round her little shoe-shaped
snuff-box, vainly seeking for the fraction of a pinch. I can't help
thinking that if Mr. Barton had shaken into that little box a small
portion of Scotch high-dried, he might have produced something more like
an amiable emotion in Mrs. Brick's mind than anything she had felt under
his morning's exposition of the unleavened bread. But our good Amos
laboured under a deficiency of small tact as well as of small cash; and
when he observed the action of the old woman's forefinger, he said, in
his brusque way, 'So your snuff is all gone, eh?'

Mrs. Brick's eyes twinkled with the visionary hope that the parson might
be intending to replenish her box, at least mediately, through the
present of a small copper.

'Ah, well! you'll soon be going where there is no more snuff. You'll be
in need of mercy then. You must remember that you may have to seek for
mercy and not find it, just as you're seeking for snuff.'

At the first sentence of this admonition, the twinkle subsided from Mrs.
Brick's eyes. The lid of her box went 'click!' and her heart was shut up
at the same moment.

But now Mr. Barton's attention was called for by Mr. Spratt, who was
dragging a small and unwilling boy from the rear. Mr. Spratt was a
small-featured, small-statured man, with a remarkable power of language