It is a term chiefly applied to ghosts; but Mr. Gum was a great deal more like a ghost than like a man.  He was remarkably tall and thin; a very shadow; with a white shadow of a face, and a nose that might have served as a model for a mask in a carnival of guys.  A sharp nose, twice the length and half the breadth of any ordinary nose—­a very ferret of a nose; its sharp tip standing straight out into the air.  People said, with such a nose Mr. Gum ought to have a great deal of curiosity.  And they were right; he had a great deal in a quiet way.

A most respectable man was Mr. Gum, and he prided himself upon it.  Mr. Gum—­more often called Clerk Gum in the village—­had never done a wrong thing in his life, or fallen into a scrape.  He had been altogether a pattern to Calne in general, and to its black sheep in particular.  Dr. Ashton himself could not have had less brought against him than Clerk Gum; and it would just have broken Mr. Gum’s heart had his good name been tarnished in ever so slight a degree.  Perhaps no man living had been born with a larger share of self-esteem than Jabez Gum.  Clerk of the parish longer than Dr. Ashton had been its Rector, Jabez Gum had lived at his ease in a pecuniary point of view.  It was one of those parishes (I think few of them remain now) where the clerk’s emoluments are large.  He also held other offices; was an agent for one or two companies, and was looked upon as an exceedingly substantial man for his station in life.  Perhaps he was less so than people imagined.  The old saying is all too true:  “Nobody knows where the shoe pinches but he who wears it.”

Jabez Gum had his thorn, as a great many more of us have ours, if the outside world only knew it.  And Jabez, at odd moments, when the thorn pierced him very sharply, had been wont to compare his condition to St. Paul’s, and to wonder whether the pricks inflicted on that holy man could have bled as his own did.  He meant no irreverence when he thought this; neither do I in writing it.  We are generally wounded in the most vulnerable spot about us, and Jabez Gum made no exception to the rule.  He had been assailed in his cherished respectability, his self-esteem.  Assailed and scarred.  How broad and deep the scar was Jabez never told the world, which as a rule does not sympathise with such scars, but turns aside in its cruel indifference.  The world had almost forgotten the scar now, and supposed Clerk Gum had done the same.  It was all over and done with years ago.

Jabez Gum’s wife—­to whom you will shortly have the honour of an introduction, but she is in her bedroom just now—­had borne him one child, and only one.  How this boy was loved, how tenderly reared, let Calne tell you.  Mrs. Gum had to endure no inconsiderable amount of ridicule at the time from her gossiping friends, who gave Willy sundry endearing names, applied in derision.  Certainly, if any mother ever was bound up in a child, Mrs. Gum was in hers.  The boy was well brought