living in Barchester, people of the name of Scatcherd. Of that family,
as then existing, we have only to do with two, a brother and a sister.
They were in a low rank of life, the one being a journeyman
stone-mason, and the other an apprentice to a straw-bonnet maker; but
they were, nevertheless, in some sort remarkable people. The sister
was reputed in Barchester to be a model of female beauty of the strong
and robuster cast, and had also a better reputation as being a girl of
good character and honest, womanly conduct. Both of her beauty and of
her reputation her brother was exceedingly proud, and he was the more
so when he learnt that she had been asked in marriage by a decent
master-tradesman in the city.

Roger Scatcherd had also a reputation, but not for beauty or propriety
of conduct. He was known for the best stone-mason in the four
counties, and as the man who could, on occasion, drink the most alcohol
in a given time in the same localities. As a workman, indeed, he had
higher reputation even than this: he was not only a good and very quick
stone-mason, but he had also a capacity for turning other men into good
stone-masons: he had a gift of knowing what a man could and should do;
and, by degrees, he taught himself what five, and ten, and
twenty--latterly, what a thousand and two thousand men might accomplish
among them: this, also, he did with very little aid from pen and paper,
with which he was not, and never became, very conversant. He had also
other gifts and other propensities. He could talk in a manner
dangerous to himself and to others; he could persuade without knowing
that he did so; and being himself an extreme demagogue, in those noisy
times just prior to the Reform Bill, he created a hubbub in Barchester
of which he himself had had no previous conception.

Henry Thorne among his other bad qualities had one which his friends