‘So,’ said Mr. Pilgrim, with his mouth only half empty of muffin, ‘you had a row in Shepperton Church last Sunday. I was at Jim Hood’s, the bassoon-man’s, this morning, attending his wife, and he swears he’ll be revenged on the parson—a confounded, methodistical, meddlesome chap, who must be putting his finger in every pie. What was it all about?’
‘O, a passill o’ nonsense,’ said Mr. Hackit, sticking one thumb between the buttons of his capacious waistcoat, and retaining a pinch of snuff with the other—for he was but moderately given to ‘the cups that cheer but not inebriate’, and had already finished his tea; ‘they began to sing the wedding psalm for a new-married couple, as pretty a psalm an’ as pretty a tune as any in the prayer-book. It’s been sung for every new-married couple since I was a boy. And what can be better?’ Here Mr. Hackit stretched out his left arm, threw back his head, and broke into melody—
‘O what a happy thing it is,
And joyful for to see,
Brethren to dwell together in
Friendship and unity.
But Mr. Barton is all for th’ hymns, and a sort o’ music as I can’t join in at all.’
‘And so,’ said Mr. Pilgrim, recalling Mr. Hackit from lyrical reminiscences to narrative, ‘he called out Silence! did he? when he got into the pulpit; and gave a hymn out himself to some meeting-house tune?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Hackit, stooping towards the candle to pick up a stitch, ‘and turned as red as a turkey-cock. I often say, when he preaches about meekness, he gives himself a slap in the face. He’s like me—he’s got a temper of his own.’
‘Rather a low-bred fellow, I think, Barton,’ said Mr. Pilgrim, who hated the Reverend Amos for two reasons—because he had called in a new doctor, recently settled in Shepperton; and because, being himself a dabbler in drugs, he had the credit of having cured a patient of Mr. Pilgrim’s. ‘They say his father was a Dissenting shoemaker; and he’s half a Dissenter himself. Why, doesn’t he preach extempore in that cottage up here, of a Sunday evening?’