aristocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them and had been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb.  “A clergyman, lad,” he used to say to me, “should feel in himself a bit of every class;” and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his inclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him beloved by his parishioners.  They grumbled at their obligations towards him; but what then?  It was natural to grumble at any demand for payment, tithe included, but also natural for a rector to desire his tithe and look well after the levying.  A Christian pastor who did not mind about his money was not an ideal prevalent among the rural minds of fat central England, and might have seemed to introduce a dangerous laxity of supposition about Christian laymen who happened to be creditors.  My father was none the less beloved because he was understood to be of a saving disposition, and how could he save without getting his tithe?  The sight of him was not unwelcome at any door, and he was remarkable among the clergy of his district for having no lasting feud with rich or poor in his parish.  I profited by his popularity, and for months after my mother’s death, when I was a little fellow of nine, I was taken care of first at one homestead and then at another; a variety which I enjoyed much more than my stay at the Hall, where there was a tutor.  Afterwards for several years I was my father’s constant companion in his outdoor business, riding by his side on my little pony and listening to the lengthy dialogues he held with Darby or Joan, the one on the road or in the fields, the other outside or inside her door.  In my earliest remembrance of him his hair was already grey, for I was his youngest as well as his only surviving child; and it seemed to me that advanced age was appropriate to a father, as indeed in all respects I considered him a parent so much to my honour, that the mention of my relationship to him was likely to secure me regard among those to whom I was otherwise a stranger—­my father’s stories from his life including so many names of distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to his acquaintanceship.  He was a pithy talker, and his sermons bore marks of his own composition.  It is true, they must have been already old when I began to listen to them, and they were no more than a year’s supply, so that they recurred as regularly as the Collects.  But though this system has been much ridiculed, I am prepared to defend it as equally sound with that of a liturgy; and even if my researches had shown me that some of my father’s yearly sermons had been copied out from the works of elder divines, this would only have been another proof of his good judgment.  One may prefer fresh eggs though laid by a fowl of the meanest understanding, but why fresh sermons?