Turning down Church Street, they pursued their dimly lighted way along Cannon Street, (so named from dismounted cannon captured from “rebels” which served as corner posts), through Hanging Ditch to Hyde’s Cross; thence past the deserted Apple Market, and Dr. Smith’s ancient labyrinth of a house, to the Parson’s less antiquated domicile in the corner by the Grammar School and those College-gates which had been the portals of peace and promise to Jabez, and not only to him, but to hundreds besides.
The excitement of old Joshua had been toned down amongst the wax-lights and pleasant faces around the Ashtons’ well-spread supper-table, and at first he was disposed to be conversable after his own peculiar manner. They had purposely avoided Shude-Hill Market by an ample circuit; but stragglers of both sexes from the scene of riot lay maundering or asleep in their path, or crossed it at every turn, in all stages of inebriation and disorder; until the natural irritability of the chaplain (increased by failing health) broke forth in loud-voiced indignation, ending in a wail that he was “getting old and powerless,” or he would “rise like another John Knox, and denounce the wickedness rampant in the land.”
“A good man lives there, Jabez,” said he, pointing to the black-and-white home of the head-master, where lighted windows told of hospitality awake, “a good man, but for whom I should not be alive to tell you; but there are those in the pulpit, my lads, whom the Church ought to spue out, lest they poison the flocks it is their duty to feed. Can the stream be pure if the fountain be polluted? And how shall we rebuke the gross excesses of the untaught rabble whilst chambering, gluttony, and drunkenness defile the high places of the land? Ugh! There wants another flood to wash Europe sweet and clean. The sin on the earth was not greater in the days of Noah!”
They were crossing the space before the two closed gates when he paused for lack of breath; and Travis, with no thought but to change the subject, observed to Jabez, over the head of the panting pastor—
“How quiet this little nook of ground is now! Yet to me and no doubt to you, Mr. Clegg, it is haunted by ghosts of old times!”
That set Joshua off again.
“Ugh! to hear a lad of five-and-twenty talk of old times! What’s the world coming to? Ghosts indeed! It had like to have been haunted by ghosts of something more than old times as Jabez and I know to our cost. I’ve never been right since the young ruffians had me in their clutches! And mark you, my lads, and think of it when you have young ones of your own to rear: there’s no worse sign for a country or a family than when the young jibe and jeer, mock and scorn their elders. When grey hairs fail to command respect, virtue, principle, and religion are at their lowest ebb.”
He stood within his own gate as he said this, and as Tabitha opened the door for her master, he checked all reply with—
“There! you’ve had a sermon for nothing. Ugh! you’ll forget it when the old man’s back turns. Good night, lads! See you steer clear of brawls, and give drunken fools a wide berth.”
Leaving the young men so abruptly dismissed to retrace their steps towards Hyde’s Cross, it may be as well if we throw a light on some of Parson Brookes’s dark allusions. Time had not smoothed the old man’s eccentricities, nor modified the antagonism between the Grammar School boys and the ex-master. They were always at war, and there never was wanting a casus belli. The previous September he had been more than usually irritated by a lampoon which began—