and of a larger, coarser build - a plain, quiet, sensible girl, who
had patiently nursed their mother, through her last long, tedious
illness, and been the housekeeper, and family drudge, from thence
to the present time. She was trusted and valued by her father,
loved and courted by all dogs, cats, children, and poor people, and
slighted and neglected by everybody else.

The Reverend Michael Millward himself was a tall, ponderous elderly
gentleman, who placed a shovel hat above his large, square,
massive-featured face, carried a stout walking-stick in his hand,
and incased his still powerful limbs in knee-breeches and gaiters,
- or black silk stockings on state occasions. He was a man of
fixed principles, strong prejudices, and regular habits, intolerant
of dissent in any shape, acting under a firm conviction that his
opinions were always right, and whoever differed from them must be
either most deplorably ignorant, or wilfully blind.

In childhood, I had always been accustomed to regard him with a
feeling of reverential awe - but lately, even now, surmounted, for,
though he had a fatherly kindness for the well-behaved, he was a
strict disciplinarian, and had often sternly reproved our juvenile
failings and peccadilloes; and moreover, in those days, whenever he
called upon our parents, we had to stand up before him, and say our
catechism, or repeat, 'How doth the little busy bee,' or some other
hymn, or - worse than all - be questioned about his last text, and
the heads of the discourse, which we never could remember.
Sometimes, the worthy gentleman would reprove my mother for being
over-indulgent to her sons, with a reference to old Eli, or David
and Absalom, which was particularly galling to her feelings; and,
very highly as she respected him, and all his sayings, I once heard