owards filling the little mouths.'

'Ah!' said Mr. Hackit, 'and my wife makes Mr. Barton a good stiff glass
o' brandy-and-water, when he comes into supper after his cottage
preaching. The parson likes it; it puts a bit o' colour into 'is face,
and makes him look a deal handsomer.'

This allusion to brandy-and-water suggested to Miss Gibbs the
introduction of the liquor decanters, now that the tea was cleared away;
for in bucolic society five-and-twenty years ago, the human animal of the
male sex was understood to be perpetually athirst, and 'something to
drink' was as necessary a 'condition of thought' as Time and Space.

'Now, that cottage preaching,' said Mr. Pilgrim, mixing himself a strong
glass of 'cold without,' 'I was talking about it to our Parson Ely the
other day, and he doesn't approve of it at all. He said it did as much
harm as good to give a too familiar aspect to religious teaching. That
was what Ely said--it does as much harm as good to give a too familiar
aspect to religious teaching.'

Mr. Pilgrim generally spoke with an intermittent kind of splutter;
indeed, one of his patients had observed that it was a pity such a clever
man had a 'pediment' in his speech. But when he came to what he conceived
the pith of his argument or the point of his joke, he mouthed out his
words with slow emphasis; as a hen, when advertising her accouchement,
passes at irregular intervals from pianissimo semiquavers to fortissimo
crotchets. He thought this speech of Mr. Ely's particularly metaphysical
and profound, and the more decisive of the question because it was a
generality which represented no particulars to his mind.

'Well, I don't know about that,' said Mrs. Hackit, who had always the
courage of her opinion, 'but I know, some of our labourers and
stockingers as used never to come to church, come to the cottage, and
that's better than never hearing anything good from week's end to week's
end. And there's that Track Society's as Mr. Barton has begun--I've seen
more o' the poor people with going tracking, than all the time I've lived
in the parish before. And there'd need be something done among 'em; for
the drinking at them Benefit Clubs is shameful. There's hardly a steady
man or steady woman either, but what's a dissenter.'

During this speech of Mrs. Hackit's, Mr. Pilgrim had emitted a succession
of little snorts, something like the treble grunts of a guinea-pig, which
were always with him the sign of suppresse