hodist parson?"

"Oh, just this, sir. Jerry Ogden's one of those long-faced gentlemen as
turns up their eyes and their noses at us poor miserable sinners as
takes a little beer to our dinners. Ah! to hear him talk you'd have
fancied he was too good to breathe in the same altitude with such as me.
Such lots of good advice he has for us heathens, such sighing and
groaning over us poor deluded drinkers of allegorical liquors. Ah! but
he's a tidy little cask of his own hid snug out of the way. It's just
the case with them all."

"I'm really much obliged to you," said his master, laughing, "for
comparing me to Jerry Ogden. He seems, from your account, to have been
a regular hypocrite; but that does not show that total abstinence is not
a good thing when people take it up honestly."

"Bless your simplicity, sir," said the other; "they're all pretty much
alike."

"Now there, Juniper, I know you are wrong. Mr Oliphant has many men in
his society who are thoroughly honest teetotallers, men who are truly
reformed, and, more than that, thorough christians."

"Reformed! Christians!" sneered Juniper, venomously; "a pretty likely
thing indeed. You don't know them teetotallers as well as I do, sir.
`Oh dear, no; not a drop, not a drop: wouldn't touch it for the world.'
But they manage to have it on the sly for all that. I've no faith in
'em at all. I'd rather be as I am, though I says it as shouldn't say
it, an honest fellow as gets drunk now and then, and ain't ashamed to
own it, than one of your canting teetotallers. Why, they're such an
amphibious set, there's no knowing where to have them."

"Amphibious?" said his master, laughing; "why, I should have thought
`aquatic' would have been a better word, as they profess to confine
themselves to the water; unless you mean, indeed, that they are only
half water animals."

"Oh, sir," said Graves, rather huffed, "it was only a phraseology of
mine, meaning that there was no dependence to be placed on 'em."

"Well but, Juniper, I am not speaking of hypocrites or sham
teetotallers, but of the real ones. There's Mr Oliphant and the whole
family at the rectory, you'll not pretend, I suppose, that _they_ drink
on the sly?"

"I wouldn't by no means answer for that," was the reply; "that depends
on circumstantials. There's many sorts of drinks as we poor ignorant
creatures calls intoxicating which is quite the thing with your tip-top
teetotallers. There's champagne, that's