industrious person in the parish.

It was thus that, after having made the whole hundred tremble at his
authority, in the exercise of his office of justice of the peace, he
next hoped to conquer the Behemoth, Magog Mowbray himself. His own
fears of being vanquished and the advice of his friends had indeed,
for years, prevented him from proceeding to an open rupture with his
parish, and the Squire at its head: but his irritability had been
gradually increasing ever since the departure of my uncle Elford. The
progress of his avarice at first was slow; but it gained strength as
it proceeded, and there was now no one whose opinion had sufficient
weight with him to keep it longer quiet. His friend the lawyer, it is
true, might have had some such influence over him; but the lawyer had
been duly articled to the most famous, that is the most litigious,
attorney in the country, and was himself his very famous successor; a
practitioner of the first repute.

The Squire, by a trick he thought proper to play, contributed not
a little to kindle the smothering embers. My grandfather having
announced his intention of demanding a commutation of nearly double
the sum, or of being paid his tythes in kind--first his tythes _de
jure_, and next his tythes by custom; enumerating them all and each;
corn, hay, hops and hemp; fruits, roots, seeds and weeds; wool, milk,
chickens, ducklings, and goslings, or eggs; corn rakings and pond
drawings; not forgetting agistment and _subbois_, or _sylva caedua_;
with many many more of the sweets of our prolific mother earth, which
I would enumerate if I did but recollect them, and for which men so
often have been and still are impleaded in Court Christian--these
particulars, I say, being recapitulated and set forth in terrible
array, by the rector, excited in the whole parish so much dread of the