understand. Hence this question of wishing to be rid of one's
contemporaries associates itself with my filial feeling, and calls up
the thought that I might as justifiably wish that I had had other
parents than those whose loving tones are my earliest memory, and whose
last parting first taught me the meaning of death. I feel bound to quell
such a wish as blasphemy.

Besides, there are other reasons why I am contented that my father was a
country parson, born much about the same time as Scott and Wordsworth;
notwithstanding certain qualms I have felt at the fact that the property
on which I am living was saved out of tithe before the period of
commutation, and without the provisional transfiguration into a modus.
It has sometimes occurred to me when I have been taking a slice of
excellent ham that, from a too tenable point of view, I was breakfasting
on a small squealing black pig which, more than half a century ago, was
the unwilling representative of spiritual advantages not otherwise
acknowledged by the grudging farmer or dairyman who parted with him. One
enters on a fearful labyrinth in tracing compound interest backward, and
such complications of thought have reduced the flavour of the ham; but
since I have nevertheless eaten it, the chief effect has been to
moderate the severity of my radicalism (which was not part of my
paternal inheritance) and to raise the assuaging reflection, that if the
pig and the parishioner had been intelligent enough to anticipate my
historical point of view, they would have seen themselves and the rector
in a light that would have made tithe voluntary. Notwithstanding such
drawbacks I am rather fond of the mental furniture I got by having a
father who was well acquainted with all ranks of his neighbours, and am
thankful that he was not one of those aristocratic clergymen who could
not have sat down to a meal with any family in the parish except my
lord's--still more that he was not an earl or a marquis. A chief