Mr and Miss Boulderstone left me a little fatigued, but in no way sore or grumbling.  They only sent me back with additional zest to my Plato, of which I enjoyed a hearty page or two before any one else arrived.  The only other visitors I had that day were an old surgeon in the navy, who since his retirement had practised for many years in the neighbourhood, and was still at the call of any one who did not think him too old-fashioned—­for even here the fashions, though decidedly elderly young ladies by the time they arrived, held their sway none the less imperiously—­and Mr Brownrigg, the churchwarden.  More of Dr Duncan by and by.

Except Mr and Miss Boulderstone, I had not yet seen any common people.  They were all decidedly uncommon, and, as regarded most of them, I could not think I should have any difficulty in preaching to them.  For, whatever place a man may give to preaching in the ritual of the church—­indeed it does not properly belong to the ritual at all—­it is yet the part of the so-called service with which his personality has most to do.  To the influences of the other parts he has to submit himself, ever turning the openings of his soul towards them, that he may not be a mere praying-machine; but with the sermon it is otherwise.  That he produces.  For that he is responsible.  And therefore, I say, it was a great comfort to me to find myself amongst a people from which my spirit neither shrunk in the act of preaching, nor with regard to which it was likely to feel that it was beating itself against a stone wall.  There was some good in preaching to a man like Weir or Old Rogers.  Whether there was any good in preaching to a woman like Mrs Oldcastle I did not know.

The evening I thought I might give to my books, and thus end my first Monday in my parish; but, as I said, Mr Brownrigg, the churchwarden, called and stayed a whole weary hour, talking about matters quite uninteresting to any who may hereafter peruse what I am now writing.  Really he was not an interesting man:  short, broad, stout, red-faced, with an immense amount of mental inertia, discharging itself in constant lingual activity about little nothings.  Indeed, when there was no new nothing to be had, the old nothing would do over again to make a fresh fuss about.  But if you attempted to convey a thought into his mind which involved the moving round half a degree from where he stood, and looking at the matter from a point even so far new, you found him utterly, totally impenetrable, as pachydermatous as any rhinoceros or behemoth.  One other corporeal fact I could not help observing, was, that his cheeks rose at once from the collar of his green coat, his neck being invisible, from the hollow between it and the jaw being filled up to a level.  The conformation was just what he himself delighted to contemplate in his pigs, to which his resemblance was greatly increased by unwearied endeavours to keep himself close shaved.—­I could not help feeling anxious about his son and Jane