his ears, his shoulders were bent and his knees feeble,
but he was still hale, and was much respected in our little world of
Paleham. His name was Pontifex.

His wife was said to be his master; I have been told she brought him a
little money, but it cannot have been much. She was a tall,
square-shouldered person (I have heard my father call her a Gothic woman)
who had insisted on being married to Mr Pontifex when he was young and
too good-natured to say nay to any woman who wooed him. The pair had
lived not unhappily together, for Mr Pontifex's temper was easy and he
soon learned to bow before his wife's more stormy moods.

Mr Pontifex was a carpenter by trade; he was also at one time parish
clerk; when I remember him, however, he had so far risen in life as to be
no longer compelled to work with his own hands. In his earlier days he
had taught himself to draw. I do not say he drew well, but it was
surprising he should draw as well as he did. My father, who took the
living of Paleham about the year 1797, became possessed of a good many of
old Mr Pontifex's drawings, which were always of local subjects, and so
unaffectedly painstaking that they might have passed for the work of some
good early master. I remember them as hanging up framed and glazed in
the study at the Rectory, and tinted, as all else in the room was tinted,
with the green reflected from the fringe of ivy leaves that grew around
the windows. I wonder how they will actually cease and come to an end as
drawings, and into what new phases of being they will then enter.

Not content with being an artist, Mr Pontifex must needs also be a
musician. He built the organ in the church with his own hands, and made
a smaller one which he kept in his own house. He could play as much as
he could draw, not very well according to professional standards, but
much better than could have been expected. I myself showed a taste for
music at an early age, and old Mr Pontifex on finding it out, as he soon
did, became partial to me in consequence.

It may be thought that with so many irons in the fire he could hardly be
a very thriving man, but this was not the case. His father had been a
day labourer, and he had himself begun life with no other capital than
his good sense and good constitution; now, however, there was a goodly
show of timber about his yard, and a look of solid comfort over his whole
establishment. Towards the close of the eighteenth century and n