in a different coloured ink, and generally manipulates the register
as a Greek manages his hand at ecarte, or as a Hebrew dealer in
Moabite bric-a-brac treats a synagogue roll. We well remember one
villain who had locked himself into the vestry (he was disguised as
an archaeologist), and who was enjoying his wicked pleasure with the
register, when the vestry somehow caught fire, the rusty key would
not turn in the door, and the villain was roasted alive, in spite of
the disinterested efforts to save him made by all the virtuous
characters in the story. Let the fate of this bold, bad man be a
warning to wicked earls, baronets, and all others who attempt to
destroy the record of the marriage of a hero's parents. Fate will
be too strong for them in the long run, though they bribe the parish
clerk, or carry off in white wax an impression of the keys of the
vestry and of the iron chest in which a register should repose.

There is another and more prosaic danger in the way of villains, if
the new bill, entitled "The Parish Registers Preservation Act," ever
becomes law. The bill provides that every register earlier than
1837 shall be committed to the care of the Master of the Rolls, and
removed to the Record Office. Now the common villain of fiction
would feel sadly out of place in the Register Office, where a more
watchful eye than that of a comic parish clerk would be kept on his
proceedings. Villains and local antiquaries will, therefore, use
all their parliamentary influence to oppose and delay this bill,
which is certainly hard on the parish archaeologist. The men who
grub in their local registers, and slowly compile parish or county
history, deserve to be encouraged rather than depressed. Mr.
Chester Waters, therefore, has suggested that copies of registers
should be made, and the comparatively legible copy left in the
parish, while the crabbed original is conveyed to the Record Office