"What an old fox it is!" said Sir Maximus. "Why couldn't he send the things to me at once along with the letter?"
"No, no, Max; he uses a justifiable caution," said the rector, a refined and rather severe likeness of his brother, with a ring of fearlessness and decision in his voice which startled all flaccid men and unruly boys. "What are you going to do, Phil?" he added, seeing his nephew rise.
"To write, of course. Those other matters are yours, I suppose?" said Mr. Debarry, looking at Christian.
"Yes, sir."
"I shall send you with a letter to the preacher. You can describe your own property. And the seal, uncle—was it your coat-of-arms?"
"No, it was this head of Achilles. Here, I can take it off the ring, and you can carry it, Christian. But don't lose that, for I've had it ever since eighteen hundred. I should like to send my compliments with it," the rector went on, looking at his brother, "and beg that since he has so much wise caution at command, he would exercise a little in more public matters, instead of making himself a firebrand in my parish, and teaching hucksters and tape-weavers that it's their business to dictate to statesmen."
"How did Dissenters, and Methodists, and Quakers, and people of that sort first come up, uncle?" said Miss Selina, a radiant girl of twenty, who had given much time to the harp.
"Dear me, Selina," said her elder sister, Harriet, whose forte was general knowledge, "don't you remember 'Woodstock'? They were in Cromwell's time."
"Oh! Holdenough, and those people? Yes; but they preached in the churches; they had no chapels. Tell me, uncle Gus; I like to be wise," said Selina, looking up at the face which was smiling down on her with a sort of severe benignity. "Phil says I'm an ignorant puss."
"The seeds of Nonconformity were sown at the Reformation, my dear, when some obstinate man made scruples about surplices and the place of the communion-table, and other trifles of that sort. But the Quakers came up about Cromwell's time, and the Methodists only in the last century. The first Methodists were regular clergymen, the more's the pity."