THE PARSONAGE.


It was not without misgiving that I knocked modestly at the door of Mr
Jehu Tomkins. For himself, there was no solidity in his moral
composition, nothing to grapple or rely upon. He was a small weak man of
no character at all, and but for his powerful wife and active partner,
would have become the smallest of unknown quantities in the respectable
parish that contained him. Upon his own weak shoulders he could not have
sustained the burden of an establishment, and must inevitably have
dwindled into the lightest of light porters, or the most aged of
errand-boys. Nothing could have saved him from the operation of a law,
as powerful and certain as that of gravitation, in virtue of which the
soft and empty-headed of this world walk to the wall, and resign,
without a murmur, their places to their betters. As for the deaconess, I
have said already that the fact of her being a lady, and the possessor
of a heart, constituted the only ground of hope that I could have in
reference to her. This I felt to be insecure enough when I held the
knocker in my hand, and remembered all at once the many little tales
that I had heard, every one of which went far to prove that ladies may
be ladies without the generous weakness of their sex,--and carry hearts
about with them as easily as they carry bags.

My first application was unsuccessful. The deacon was not at home. "Mr
Tomkins and his lady had gone _to hear_ the Reverend Doctor
Whitefroth,"--a northern and eccentric light, now blazing for a time in
the metropolis. It is a curious fact, and worthy to be recorded, that Mr
Tomkins, and Mr Buster, and every non-conformist whom I had hitherto
encountered, never professed to visit the house of prayer with any other