“Then when it was brought all cool and foaming from out of the cellar, and he took the first glass as a matter of course, he’d got a knack of saying something sensible to a man in a way as did more good than the preaching in a month of Sundays.
“‘That!’ he’d say, with a smack of the lips when he’d finished the cool draught, ‘That’s good, refreshing, invigorating, and hearty. What a pity it is some men will be such fools as to take more than is good for them. Come, my lads, another glass round, and then to work.’
“Why, you may laugh at me, but we all of us loved our parson, and he could turn us all this way or that way with his little finger.
“Well, we were out on the green, as I said, and the talk turned about oiling the weathercock, and about how we’d heard as Steeple Jack, as he called himself, had undertaken to do Upperthorpe steeple, as is thirty feet lower than ours, and had got the money and gone off.
“‘I thought he was a rogue,’ said Billy Johnson. ‘He looked like it; drinking sort of fellow. Tell you what, I’m game to do it any time you like.’
“‘Not you,’ says Joey Rance. ‘It ain’t in you.’
“‘Ain’t it,’ says Billy, tightening his belt, and then—
“‘My good man,’ says the Rector, ‘I couldn’t think of allowing it.’
“You see, ours was a splendid spire, standing altogether a hundred and seventy feet six inches high; and as it says in the old history, was a landmark and a beacon to the country for miles round. There was a square tower seventy feet high, and out of this sprang the spire, tapering up a hundred feet, and certainly one of the finest in the county.
“‘Oh, I’d let him go, sir,’ says Joey: ‘he can climb like a squirrel.’