representative of the family was certainly not a Fitz-Hugh but a Fitchew, save that he was as independent as a baron, and, notwithstanding his poverty, cared little or nothing what people thought about him.  He could neither read nor write, and was full of the most obstinate and absurd prejudices.  He was incredulous of everything which was said to him by people with any education, but what he had heard from those who were as uneducated as himself, or the beliefs, if such they can be called, which grew in his skull mysteriously, by spontaneous generation, he held most tenaciously.  His literature was Cowfold, the people, the animals, the inanimate objects of which it was made up, and his criticism on these was often just.  He never could be persuaded to enter either church or chapel.  Of the arguments for Christianity, of the undesigned coincidences in the Bible, of the evidence from prophecy, of the metaphysical necessity for an incarnation and atonement, he knew nothing, and it was a marvel to all respectable young persons how Fitchew, whose ignorance would disgrace a charity child, and who did not know that the world was round, or the date of the battle of Hastings, should set himself up against those who were so superior to him.

“What should we say,” observed the superintendent of the Dissenting Sunday-school one day to one of his classes, having Fitchew in his mind, “of a man who, if he was on a voyage in a ship commanded by a captain with a knowledge of navigation, should refuse in a storm to obey orders, affirming that they were all of no use, and should betake himself to his own little raft?”

Curiously enough, the Sunday before, the vicar, having the Dissenter in his mind, had said just the same of “unlettered schismatics,” as he called them.

Fitchew always had one argument for those friends who strove to convert him.  “I don’t see as them that goes to church are any better than them as don’t.  What’s he know about it?” meaning the parson or the minister, as the case might be.

Fitchew was very rough and coarse, and rather grasping in his dealings with those who employed him, not so much because he was naturally mean, but because he was always determined that well-dressed folk should not “put on him.”  Nevertheless, he was in his way sympathetic and even tender, particularly to those persons who suffered as he did, for he was afflicted with a kind of nervous dyspepsia, not infrequent even amongst the poor, and it kept him awake at night and gave him the “horrors.”

“Well, Fitchew, are you any better?” said Miriam.

“Bad just now.  Ain’t had no regular sleep for a fortnight.  Last night it was awful.  I kicked about and sat up; the noise in my ears was something, I can tell you; and then the wind in me!  It’s my belief that that there noise in my ears is the wind a coming out through them.  I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I got up and walked up and down the road.  Would you believe it, the missus never stirred; there she lay like a stone, and when I came in she says to me, ’Wot’s the matter with you?’ That’s just like her.  She goes to bed, turns round, and never knows nothing of anything till the morning.  I could, have druv my head agin the door-post.”