’Ah, I see you don’t know how the goslings live!  But did you notice how it rained sugar-plums yesterday?’ (Here Tommy became attentive.) ’Why, they fell into my pocket as I rode along.  You look in my pocket and see if they didn’t.’  Tommy, without waiting to discuss the alleged antecedent, lost no time in ascertaining the presence of the agreeable consequent, for he had a well-founded belief in the advantages of diving into the Vicar’s pocket.  Mr. Gilfil called it his wonderful pocket, because, as he delighted to tell the ‘young shavers’ and ’two-shoes’—­so he called all little boys and girls—­whenever he put pennies into it, they turned into sugar-plums or gingerbread, or some other nice thing.  Indeed, little Bessie Parrot, a flaxen-headed ‘two-shoes’, very white and fat as to her neck, always had the admirable directness and sincerity to salute him with the question—­’What zoo dot in zoo pottet?’

You can imagine, then, that the christening dinners were none the less merry for the presence of the parson.  The farmers relished his society particularly, for he could not only smoke his pipe, and season the details of parish affairs with abundance of caustic jokes and proverbs, but, as Mr. Bond often said, no man knew more than the Vicar about the breed of cows and horses.  He had grazing-land of his own about five miles off, which a bailiff, ostensibly a tenant, farmed under his direction; and to ride backwards and forwards, and look after the buying and selling of stock, was the old gentleman’s chief relaxation, now his hunting days were over.  To hear him discussing the respective merits of the Devonshire breed and the short-horns, or the last foolish decision of the magistrates about a pauper, a superficial observer might have seen little difference, beyond his superior shrewdness, between the Vicar and his bucolic parishioners; for it was his habit to approximate his accent and mode of speech to theirs, doubtless because he thought it a mere frustration of the purposes of language to talk of ‘shear-hogs’ and ‘ewes’ to men who habitually said ‘sharrags’ and ‘yowes’.  Nevertheless the farmers themselves were perfectly aware of the distinction between them and the parson, and had not at all the less belief in him as a gentleman and a clergyman for his easy speech and familiar manners.  Mrs. Parrot smoothed her apron and set her cap right with the utmost solicitude when she saw the Vicar coming, made him her deepest curtsy, and every Christmas had a fat turkey ready to send him with her ‘duty’ And in the most gossiping colloquies with Mr. Gilfil, you might have observed that both men and women ‘minded their words’, and never became indifferent to his approbation.

The same respect attended him in his strictly clerical functions.  The benefits of baptism were supposed to be somehow bound up with Mr. Gilfil’s personality, so metaphysical a distinction as that between a man and his office being, as yet, quite foreign to the mind of a good Shepperton Churchman, savouring, he would have thought, of Dissent on the very face of it.  Miss Selina Parrot put off her marriage a whole month when Mr. Gilfil had an attack of rheumatism, rather than be married in a makeshift manner by the Milby curate.