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 humourist.  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 in 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.

After an outburst, there is a truce between the friends for a while, till it is broken by theological battle over the age of the world, or some other the like remote matter, which seems important to me only in so far as it affords ground for disputation.  These truces are broken sometimes by the doctor, sometimes by the clergyman.  T’other evening the doctor and myself were sitting in the garden, smoking each a meditative pipe.  Dreamthorp lay below, with its old castle and its lake, and its hundred wreaths of smoke floating upward into the sunset.  Where we sat, the voices of children playing in the street could hardly reach us.  Suddenly a step was heard on the gravel, and the next moment the clergyman appeared, as it seemed to me, with a peculiar airiness of aspect, and the light of a humourous satisfaction