redbound
book to the floor. 'Here, I'll have that,' said the squire. 'Allow me,
sir,' said Peterborough; and they sprang into a collision.

'Would you jump out of your pulpit to pick up an old woman's umbrella?'
the squire asked him in wrath, and muttered of requiring none of
his clerical legerdemain with books of business. Tears were in
Peterborough's eyes. My aunt Dorothy's eyes dwelt kindly on him to
encourage him, but the man's irritable nose was again his enemy.

Captain Bulsted chanced to say in the musical voice of inquiry: 'Prayers
are not yet over, are they?'

'No, nor never will be with a parson blowing his horn at this rate,'
the squire rejoined. 'And mind you,' he said to Peterborough, after
dismissing the servants, to whom my aunt Dorothy read the morning
lessons apart, 'I'd not have had this happen, sir, for money in lumps.
I've always known I should hang the day when my house wasn't blessed
in the morning by prayer. So did my father, and his before him. Fiddle!
sir, you can't expect young people to wear decent faces when the
parson's hopping over the floor like a flea, and trumpeting as if the
organ-pipe wouldn't have the sermon at any price. You tried to juggle me
out of this book here.'

'On my!--indeed, sir, no!' Peterborough proclaimed his innocence, and it
was unlikely that the squire should have suspected him.

Captain Bulsted had come to us for his wife, whom he had not found at
home on his arrival last midnight.

'God bless my soul,' said the squire, 'you don't mean to tell me she's
gone off, William?'

'Oh! dear, no, sir,' said the captain, 'she's only cruising.'

The squire recommended a draught of old ale. The captain accepted it.
His comportment was cheerful in a sober fashion, notwithstanding the
transparent perturbation of his spirit. He answered my aunt Dorothy's
questions relating to Julia simply and manfully, as became a gallant
seaman, cordially excusing his wife for not having been at home to
welcome him, with the singular plea, based on his knowledge of the sex,
that the nearer she knew him to be the less able was she to sit on
her chair waiting like Patience. He drank his ale from the hands of
Sillabin, our impassive new butler, who had succeeded Sewis, the squire
told him, like a Whig Ministry the Tory; proof that things were not
improving.

'I thought, sir, things were getting better,' said the captain.

'The damnedest mistake ever made, William. How about the Fall of Ma