plain, quiet, sensible girl, who had patiently
nursed their mother, through her last long, tedious illness, and been the
housekeeper, and family drudge, from thence to the present time. She was
trusted and valued by her father, loved and courted by all dogs, cats,
children, and poor people, and slighted and neglected by everybody else.

The Reverend Michael Millward himself was a tall, ponderous elderly
gentleman, who placed a shovel hat above his large, square,
massive-featured face, carried a stout walking-stick in his hand, and
incased his still powerful limbs in knee-breeches and gaiters,--or black
silk stockings on state occasions. He was a man of fixed principles,
strong prejudices, and regular habits, intolerant of dissent in any
shape, acting under a firm conviction that his opinions were always
right, and whoever differed from them must be either most deplorably
ignorant, or wilfully blind.

In childhood, I had always been accustomed to regard him with a feeling
of reverential awe--but lately, even now, surmounted, for, though he had
a fatherly kindness for the well-behaved, he was a strict disciplinarian,
and had often sternly reproved our juvenile failings and peccadilloes;
and moreover, in those days, whenever he called upon our parents, we had
to stand up before him, and say our catechism, or repeat, 'How doth the
little busy bee,' or some other hymn, or--worse than all--be questioned
about his last text, and the heads of the discourse, which we never could
remember. Sometimes, the worthy gentleman would reprove my mother for
being over-indulgent to her sons, with a reference to old Eli, or David
and Absalom, which was particularly galling to her feelings; and, very
highly as she respected him, and all his sayings, I once heard her
exclaim, 'I wish to goodness he had a son himself! He wouldn't be so
ready with his advice to other people then;--he'd see what it is to have
a couple of boys to keep in order.'

He had a laudable care for his own bodily health--kept very early hours,
regularly took a walk before breakfast, was vastly particular about warm
and dry clothing, had never been known to preach a sermon without
previously swallowing a raw egg--albeit he was gifted with good lungs and
a powerful voice,--and was, generally, extremely particular about what he
ate and drank, though by no means abstemious, and having a mode of
dietary peculiar to himself,--being a great despiser of tea and such
slops,