cost.

Balancing matters (as they did their fish, when the price was worth it,
in Weigh Lane), they came to the set conclusion that the law and the
Lord might not agree concerning the child cast among them by the latter.
A child or two had been thrown ashore before, and trouble once or twice
had come of it; and this child being cast, no one could say how, to such
a height above all other children, he was likely enough to bring a spell
upon their boats, if anything crooked to God's will were done; and even
to draw them to their last stocking, if anything offended the providence
of law.

In any other place it would have been a point of combat what to say and
what to do in such a case as this. But Flamborough was of all the wide
world happiest in possessing an authority to reconcile all doubts. The
law and the Lord--two powers supposed to be at variance always, and to
share the week between them in proportions fixed by lawyers--the
holy and unholy elements of man's brief existence, were combined in
Flamborough parish in the person of its magisterial rector. He was also
believed to excel in the arts of divination and medicine too, for he was
a full Doctor of Divinity. Before this gentleman must be laid, both for
purse and conscience' sake, the case of the child just come out of the
fogs.

And true it was that all these powers were centred in one famous man,
known among the laity as "Parson Upandown." For the Reverend Turner
Upround, to give him his proper name, was a doctor of divinity, a
justice of the peace, and the present rector of Flamborough. Of all his
offices and powers, there was not one that he overstrained; and all that
knew him, unless they were thorough-going rogues and vagabonds, loved