y they did not come home to dinner?

Johnny could see a sleeper as soon as any, were he ensconced in the
remotest and obscurest corner of the meeting, and let him hold up his
head and sleep as cleverly as he might from long habit. And did not he
once give a most notable piece of advice to a _rich_ Friend who was a
shocking sleeper? Was not this Friend very ill, and didn't Johnny go to
see him; and didn't he, when the Friend complained that he could get no
sleep, and that not all the physic, the strongest opium even of the
doctor's shop, could make him,--didn't Johnny Darbyshire say right
slap-bang out, which not another of the plainest-spoken Friends dare
have done to a rich man like that,--"Stuff and nonsense; and a fig for
opium and doctor's stuff,--send, man, send for the meeting-house bench,
and lie thee down on that, and I'll be bound thou'lt sleep like one of
the seven sleepers."

Undoubtedly Johnny was a Quaker; a right slap-dash Quaker of the old
Foxite school; and had anybody come smiling to him in the hope of
getting anything out of him, he would have said to him as George Fox
said to Colonel Hackett, "Beware of hypocrisy and a rotten heart!" True,
had you questioned him as to his particular religious doctrines or
articles of faith, he would not have been very clear, or very ready to
give you any explanation at all, for the very best of reasons,--he was
not so superstitious as to have a creed. A creed! that was a rag of the
old woman of Babylon. No, if you wanted to know all about doctrines and
disputations, why, you might look into Barclay's Apology. There was a
book big enough for you, he should think. For himself, like most of his
cloth, he would confine himself to his _feelings_. He would employ a
variety of choice and unique phrases; such as, "If a man want to know
what religion is, he must not go running after parsons, and bishops, and
all that sort of man-made ministers, blind leaders of the blind, who can
talk by the hour, but about what neither man, woman, nor child, for the
life of them, can tell, except when they come for their tithes, or their
Easter dues, and then they speak plain enough with a vengeance. One of
these Common-Prayer priests," said he, "once came to advise me about the
lawfulness of paying Church-rates, and, instead of walking into my
parlor, he walked through the next door, and nearly broke his neck, into
the cellar. A terrible stramash of a lumber, and a plunging and a
groaning w