Chapter 1

‘No!’ said lawyer Dempster, in a loud, rasping, oratorical tone, struggling against chronic huskiness, ‘as long as my Maker grants me power of voice and power of intellect, I will take every legal means to resist the introduction of demoralizing, methodistical doctrine into this parish; I will not supinely suffer an insult to be inflicted on our venerable pastor, who has given us sound instruction for half a century.’

It was very warm everywhere that evening, but especially in the bar of the Red Lion at Milby, where Mr. Dempster was seated mixing his third glass of brandy-and-water. He was a tall and rather massive man, and the front half of his large surface was so well dredged with snuff, that the cat, having inadvertently come near him, had been seized with a severe fit of sneezing—an accident which, being cruelly misunderstood, had caused her to be driven contumeliously from the bar. Mr. Dempster habitually held his chin tucked in, and his head hanging forward, weighed down, perhaps, by a preponderant occiput and a bulging forehead, between which his closely-clipped coronal surface lay like a flat and new-mown table-land. The only other observable features were puffy cheeks and a protruding yet lipless mouth. Of his nose I can only say that it was snuffy; and as Mr. Dempster was never caught in the act of looking at anything in particular, it would have been difficult to swear to the colour of his eyes.

‘Well! I’ll not stick at giving myself trouble to put down such hypocritical cant,’ said Mr. Tomlinson, the rich miller. ‘I know well enough what your Sunday evening lectures are good for—for wenches to meet their sweethearts, and brew mischief. There’s work enough with the servant-maids as it is—such as I never heard the like of in my mother’s time, and it’s all along o’ your schooling and newfangled plans. Give me a servant as can nayther read nor write, I say, and doesn’t know the year o’ the Lord as she was born in. I should like to know what good those Sunday schools have done, now. Why, the boys used to go a birds-nesting of a Sunday morning; and a capital thing too—ask any farmer; and very pretty it was to see the strings o’ heggs hanging up in poor people’s houses. You’ll not see ‘em nowhere now.’

‘Pooh!’ said Mr. Luke Byles, who piqued himself on his reading, and was in the habit of asking casual acquaintances if they knew anything of Hobbes; ‘it is right enough that the lower orders should be instructed. But this sectarianism within the Church ought to be put down. In point of fact, these Evangelicals are not Churchmen at all; they’re no better than Presbyterians.’

‘Presbyterians? what are they?’ inquired Mr. Tomlinson, who often said his father had given him ‘no eddication, and he didn’t care who knowed it; he could buy up most o’ th’ eddicated men he’d ever come across.’

‘The Presbyterians,’ said Mr. Dempster, in rather a louder tone than before, holding that every appeal for information must naturally be addressed to him, ‘are a sect founded in the reign of Charles I., by a man named John Presbyter, who hatched all the brood of Dissenting vermin that crawl about in dirty alleys, and circumvent the lord of the manor in order to get a few yards of ground for their pigeon-house conventicles.’