gold on his three-cornered bat and sky-blue coat, and by the seal of
arms annexed to his great gold watch-chain; his air and aspect befitted
a Justice of Peace and County Major, and all earth's pride and pomposity
were squeezed into this small gentleman of five feet high. The next in
importance was a grave person of sixty or seventy years, whose black
suit and hand sufficiently indicated his character, and the polished
baldness of whose head was worthy of a famous preacher in the village,
half a century before, who had made wigs a subject of pulpit
denunciation. The two other figures, both clad in dark gray, showed the
sobriety of Deacons; one was ridiculously tall and thin, like a man of
ordinary bulk infinitely produced, as the mathematicians say; while the
brevity and thickness of his colleague seemed a compression of the same
man. These four talked with great earnestness, and their gestures
intimated that they had revived the ancient dispute about the meeting-
house steeple. The grave person in black spoke with composed solemnity,
as if he were addressing a Synod; the short deacon grunted out
occasional sentences, as brief as himself; his tall brother drew the
long thread of his argument through the whole discussion, and (reasoning
from analogy) his voice must indubitably have been small and squeaking.
But the little old man in gold-lace was evidently scorched by his own
red-hot eloquence; he bounced from one to another, shook his cane at the
steeple, at the two deacons, and almost in the parson's face, stamping
with his foot fiercely enough to break a hole through the very earth;
though, indeed, it could not exactly be said that the green grass bent
beneath him. The figure, noticed as coming behind all the rest, had now
surmounted the ascent from the mill, and proved to be an elderly lady
with something in her hand.

"Why does she walk so slow?" asked David.