CHAPTER II.
"There has never been occasion to use them since I have been in the
Parish," said Parson Dale.
"What does that prove?" quoth the Squire sharply, and looking the Parson full in the face.
"Prove!" repeated Mr. Dale—with a smile of benign, yet too conscious superiority—"What does experience prove?"
"That your forefathers were great blockheads, and that their descendant is not a whit the wiser."
"Squire," replied the Parson, "although that is a melancholy conclusion,
yet if you mean it to apply universally, and not to the family of the
Dales in particular, it is not one which my candor as a reasoner, and my
Humility as a mortal, will permit me to challenge."
"I defy you," said Mr. Hazledean triumphantly. "But to stick to the subject, which it is monstrous hard to do when one talks with a parson, I only just ask you to look yonder, and tell me on your conscience—I don't even say as a parson, but as a parishioner—whether you ever saw a more disreputable spectacle?"
While he spoke, the Squire, leaning heavily on the Parson's left shoulder, extended his cane in a line parallel with the right of that disputatious ecclesiastic, so that he might guide the organ of sight to the object he had thus flatteringly described.
"I confess," said the Parson, "that, regarded by the eye of the senses, it is a thing that in its best day had small pretensions to beauty, and is not elevated into the Picturesque even by neglect and decay. But, my friend, regarded by the eye of the inner man—of the rural philosopher and parochial legislator—I say it is by neglect and decay that it is rendered a very pleasing feature in what I may call 'the moral topography of a parish.'"
The Squire looked at the Parson as if be could have beaten him; and indeed, regarding the object in dispute not only with the eye of the outer man, but the eye of law and order, the eye of a country gentleman and a justice of the peace, the spectacle was scandalously disreputable. It was moss-grown; it was worm-eaten; it was broken right in the middle; through its four socketless eyes, neighbored by the nettle, peered the thistle:—the thistle!—a forest of thistles!—and, to complete the degradation of the whole, those thistles had attracted the donkey of an itinerant tinker; and the irreverent animal was in the very act of taking his luncheon out of the eyes and jaws of—THE PARISH STOCKS.