ure to do something while I am out."--"I wish you would,
sir!" said the boy; "it would be a letter of licence for the whole
evening." The Doctor saw the force of the retort: my two tutelaries will
see it by this time. They paid in advance; and I have given liberal
interpretation to the order.

The following story of Dr. Parr was told me and others, about 1829, by the
late Leonard Horner,[397] who knew him intimately. Parr was staying in a
house full of company, I think in the north of England. Some gentlemen from
America were among the guests, and after dinner they disputed some of
Parr's assertions or arguments. So the Doctor broke out with "Do you know
what country you come from? You come from the place to which we used to
send our thieves!" This made the host angry, and he gave Parr such a severe
rebuke as sent him from the room in ill-humor. The rest walked on the lawn,
amusing the Americans with sketches of the Doctor. There was a dark cloud
overhead, and from that cloud presently came a voice which called _Tham_
(Parr-lisp for _Sam_). The company were astonished for a moment, but
thought the Doctor was calling his servant in the house, and that the
apparent direction was an illusion arising out of inattention. But
presently the sound was repeated, certainly from the cloud,

"And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before."

There was now a little alarm: where could the Doctor have got to? They ran
to his bedroom, and there they discovered a sufficient rather than
satisfactory explanation. The Doctor had taken his pipe into his bedroom,
and had seated himself, in sulky mood, upon the higher bar of a large and
deep old-fashioned grate with a high mantelshelf. Here he had {177} tumbled
backwards, and doubled himself up between the bars and the back of the
grate. He was fixed tight, and when he called for help, he could only throw
his voice up the chimney. The echo from the cloud was the warning which
brought his friends to the rescue.

ATTACKS ON RELIGIOUS CUSTOMS.

Days of political paradox were coming, at which we now stare. Cobbett[398]
said, about 1830, in earnest, that in the country every man who did not
take off his hat to the clergyman was suspected, and ran a fair chance of
having something brought against him. I heard this assertion canvassed,
when it was made, in a party of elderly persons. The Radicals backed it,
the old Tories rather denied it, but in a way which satisfied me they ought
to have de