y
imagination as if they had belonged to different regions of the globe.
From these we sometimes rode onward to the adjoining parish, where also
my father officiated, for he was a pluralist, but--I hasten to add--on
the smallest scale; for his one extra living was a poor vicarage, with
hardly fifty parishioners, and its church would have made a very shabby
barn, the grey worm-eaten wood of its pews and pulpit, with their doors
only half hanging on the hinges, being exactly the colour of a lean
mouse which I once observed as an interesting member of the scant
congregation, and conjectured to be the identical church mouse I had
heard referred to as an example of extreme poverty; for I was a
precocious boy, and often reasoned after the fashion of my elders,
arguing that "Jack and Jill" were real personages in our parish, and
that if I could identify "Jack" I should find on him the marks of a
broken crown.

Sometimes when I am in a crowded London drawing-room (for I am a
town-bird now, acquainted with smoky eaves, and tasting Nature in the
parks) quick flights of memory take me back among my father's
parishioners while I am still conscious of elbowing men who wear the
same evening uniform as myself; and I presently begin to wonder what
varieties of history lie hidden under this monotony of aspect. Some of
them, perhaps, belong to families with many quarterings; but how many
"quarterings" of diverse contact with their fellow-countrymen enter into
their qualifications to be parliamentary leaders, professors of social
science, or journalistic guides of the popular mind? Not that I feel
myself a person made competent by experience; on the contrary, I argue
that since an observation of different ranks has still left me
practically a poor creature, what must be the condition of those who
object even to read about the life of other British classes than their
own? But of my elbowing neighbours with their crush hats, I usually
imagine that the most distinguished among them have probably had a far
more instructive journey into manhood than mine. Here, perhaps, is a
thought-worn physiognomy, seeming at the present moment to be classed as
a mere species of white cravat and swallow-tail, which may once, like
Faraday's, have shown itself in curiously dubious embryonic form leaning
against a cottage lintel in small corduroys, and hungrily eating a bit
of brown bread and bacon; _there_ is a pair of eyes, now too much
wearied by the gas-li