"'Very good, Madam; I know your predilections.'
"'Yes, Doctor; and my antipathies.'
"'The day and hour was fixed, and old Mr. Johnson, from Ottersley, came to administer the sacrament; and Miss Susan was dressed for the occasion, propped up with pillows in her high-backed arm-chair. Soon after the ceremony was over, I saw,' said the old nurse, 'a change, and I knew death was coming; Miss Dorothy was standing by her side.' 'I feel,' she remarked, 'a queer sensation coming over me. Give me a glass of water;' but she expired when in the act of attempting to take the tumbler into her hand.'"
What a melancholy contrast this presents to the death of the pious cottager, Mrs. Allen![46]
I was happy to hear from Mrs. John Roscoe, that the ministry of her husband and his pious Curate was working moral wonders amongst his parishioners. The church was uniformly crowded with attentive hearers; the people flocked to it from distant villages and hamlets. "But, Sir," she added, "my husband has to pay the usual tax which is levied on all who distinguish themselves by their zeal and energy, in exposing the absurdity and fatal tendency of the popular superstitions, and trying to win souls to Christ. 'The most favourable construction I can put on his conduct,' said an old clergyman, in a large party, 'is this—he is a little beside himself.' I immediately replied, 'It would be, reverend Sir, a great advantage to many of your parishioners, if you also were a little beside yourself; and then they would stop at home, and attend your ministrations, instead of having to walk three or four miles every Sabbath to hear my husband.' This startled him, as he did not know that I was present. He then endeavoured to eke out an apology, which he would have been much wiser to have let alone."
I was sorry to hear that my old friend Farmer Pickford had sustained an injury by the slip of the ladder on which he was standing when lopping a tree, and that he had been confined to his bed some weeks. On seeing me enter his room, he stretched forth his hand, and said, "I thought, Sir, you would give me a bit of a call, like. I am main glad to see you. Here I am, the Lord's prisoner. I would rather be the Lord's prisoner than the devil's free man, and no mistake."
"I hope the injury you have sustained is not likely to prove a lasting one."