in the manufacture of sweetmeats.  I wonder that the oddity of the thing never strikes himself.  To be at all consistent, he should put poison in his lozenges, and become the Herod of the village innocents.  One of his many eccentricities is a love for flowers, and he visits me often to have a look at my greenhouse and my borders.  I listen to his truculent and revolutionary speeches, and take my revenge by sending the gloomy egotist away with a nosegay in his hand, and a gay-coloured flower stuck in a button-hole.  He goes quite unconscious of my floral satire.

The village clergyman and the village doctor are great friends of mine; they come to visit me often, and smoke a pipe with me in my garden.  The twain love and respect each other, but they regard the world from different points of view, and I am now and again made witness of a good-humoured passage of arms.  The clergyman is old, unmarried, and a humorist.  His sallies and his gentle eccentricities seldom provoke laughter, but they are continually awakening the pleasantest smiles.  Perhaps what he has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, its death-beds, its widows and orphans, has tamed his spirit, and put a tenderness into his wit.  I do not think I have ever encountered a man who so adorns his sacred profession.  His pious, devout nature produces sermons just as naturally as my apple-trees produce apples.  He is a tree that flowers every Sunday.  Very beautiful is his reverence for the Book, his trust in it; through long acquaintance, its ideas have come to colour his entire thought, and you come upon its phrases in his ordinary speech.  He is more himself in the pulpit than anywhere else, and you get nearer him in his sermons than you do sitting with him at his tea-table, or walking with him on the country roads.  He does not feel confined in his orthodoxy; in it he is free as a bird in the air.  The doctor is, I conceive, as good a Christian as the clergyman, but he is impatient of pale or limit; he never comes to a fence without feeling a desire to get over it.  He is a great hunter of insects, and he thinks that the wings of his butterflies might yield very excellent texts; he is fond of geology, and cannot, especially when he is in the company of the clergyman, resist the temptation of hurling a fossil at Moses.  He wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her ribbons—­to annoy if he cannot subdue—­and, when his purpose is served, he puts his scepticism aside—­as the coquette puts her ribbons.  Great arguments arise between them, and the doctor loses his field through his loss of temper, which, however, he regains before any harm is done.  For the worthy man is irascible withal, and opposition draws fire from him.

TWO OLD GENTLEMEN
[Sidenote:  H.B.]

Old Joe, who has been a pirate, a buffalo-hunter, a soldier, a pastrycook, and a seller of bootlaces, collar-studs, and tie-clips in the London gutters, sits paralysed in his grandfather chair, which has a thin pad strung to the back and a flattened cushion on the seat, and declares, vainly trying to keep his tongue inside his mouth, and with his whole body shaken by paralysis, that he is happy and jolly.