I was as exact as himself, and quicker. Mr. Crimsworth made
inquiries as to how I lived, whether I got into debt--no, my accounts
with my landlady were always straight. I had hired small lodgings, which
I contrived to pay for out of a slender fund--the accumulated savings of
my Eton pocket-money; for as it had ever been abhorrent to my nature to
ask pecuniary assistance, I had early acquired habits of self-denying
economy; husbanding my monthly allowance with anxious care, in order to
obviate the danger of being forced, in some moment of future exigency,
to beg additional aid. I remember many called me miser at the time,
and I used to couple the reproach with this consolation--better to be
misunderstood now than repulsed hereafter. At this day I had my reward;
I had had it before, when on parting with my irritated uncles one of
them threw down on the table before me a 5l. note, which I was able to
leave there, saying that my travelling expenses were already provided
for. Mr. Crimsworth employed Tim to find out whether my landlady had
any complaint to make on the score of my morals; she answered that she
believed I was a very religious man, and asked Tim, in her turn, if he
thought I had any intention of going into the Church some day; for, she
said, she had had young curates to lodge in her house who were nothing
equal to me for steadiness and quietness. Tim was "a religious man"
himself; indeed, he was "a joined Methodist," which did not (be it
understood) prevent him from being at the same time an engrained rascal,
and he came away much posed at hearing this account of my piety. Having
imparted it to Mr. Crimsworth, that gentleman, who himself frequented
no place of worship, and owned no God but Mammon, turned the information
into a weapon of attack against the equability of my temper. He
commenced a series of covert sneers, of which I did not at first
perceive the drift, till my landlady happened to relate the conversation
she had had with Mr. Steighton; this enlightened me; afterwards I came
to the counting-house prepared, and managed to receive the millowner's
blasphemous sarcasms, when next levelled at me, on a buckler of
impenetrable indifference. Ere long he tired of wasting his ammunition
on a statue, but he did not throw away the shafts--he only kept them
quiet in his quiver.

Once during my clerkship I had an invitation to Crimsworth Hall; it
was on the occasion of a large party given in honour of the master's