their long walk through miry lanes, and present themselves duly
in their places at two o'clock, when Mr. Oldinport and Lady Felicia, to
whom Knebley Church was a sort of family temple, made their way among the
bows and curtsies of their dependants to a carved and canopied pew in the
chancel, diffusing as they went a delicate odour of Indian roses on the
unsusceptible nostrils of the congregation.

The farmers' wives and children sat on the dark oaken benches, but the
husbands usually chose the distinctive dignity of a stall under one of
the twelve apostles, where, when the alternation of prayers and responses
had given place to the agreeable monotony of the sermon, Paterfamilias
might be seen or heard sinking into a pleasant doze, from which he
infallibly woke up at the sound of the concluding doxology. And then they
made their way back again through the miry lanes, perhaps almost as much
the better for this simple weekly tribute to what they knew of good and
right, as many a more wakeful and critical congregation of the present
day.

Mr. Gilfil, too, used to make his way home in the later years of his
life, for he had given up the habit of dining at Knebley Abbey on a
Sunday, having, I am sorry to say, had a very bitter quarrel with Mr.
Oldinport, the cousin and predecessor of the Mr. Oldinport who flourished
in the Rev. Amos Barton's time. That quarrel was a sad pity, for the two
had had many a good day's hunting together when they were younger, and in
those friendly times not a few members of the hunt envied Mr. Oldinport
the excellent terms he was on with his vicar; for, as Sir Jasper Sitwell
observed, 'next to a man's wife, there's nobody can be such an infernal
plague to you as a parson, always under your nose on your own estate.'

I fancy the original difference which led to the rupture was very slight;
but Mr. Gilfil was of an extremely caustic turn, his satire having a
flavour of originality which was quite wanting in his sermons; and as Mr.
Oldinport's armour of conscious virtue presented some considerable and
conspicuous gaps, the Vicar's keen-edged retorts probably made a few
incisions too deep to be forgiven. Such, at least, was the view of the
case presented by Mr. Hackit, who knew as much of the matter as any third
person. For, the very week after the quarrel, when presiding at the
annual dinner of the Association for the Prosecution of Felons, held at
the Oldinport Arms, he contributed an additional zes