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Updated: June 10, 2025
Pringle never stirred beyond his parlour, and was invisible to every one, except his housekeeper and doctor, but his tall, square, curtained pew was jealously locked up, and was a grievance to the vicar, who having been foiled in several attempts, was meditating a fresh one, if, as he told his wife, he could bring his churchwarden up to the scratch, when one Sunday morning the congregation was electrified by the sound of a creak and a shake, and beheld a stout hale sunburnt gentleman, fighting with the disused door, and finally gaining the victory by strength of hand, admitting himself and a boy among the dust and the cobwebs.
I can't get the hang o' those new-fangled Yankee notions," he continued, referring to the parlour stove, named after the great philosopher whose name it bore. A large semicircle of seats was drawn up around the hearth. The squire took down from the mantel his long-stemmed "churchwarden" pipe. "I learned to smoke in Old Virginny," he said apologetically. "Had the real virgin leaf.
"Lor', Tom!" he ejaculated, on my taking him unawares, with his head leaning back and the long churchwarden he was smoking dropping out of his mouth, for he had just started, with his eyes closed, for a `lay off the land, as he styled taking a snooze. "Ye're the very h'image of what I wer' when I wer' your age though not quite so good-looking I'm a-thinking!"
He still loved to take solitary walks, and many a quiet summer afternoon the familiar figure of the venerable churchwarden, in his seedy black cloak and sugar-loaf hat, might be seen wending its way along the banks of the River Spaaren to his favorite resort in the grove.
Mr Stiles being a man somewhat versed in town life, had an impression of his own dignity, and did not quite like leaving his pastor under the erroneous idea that he being a churchwarden kept the children in order during church time.
"That will permit Monsieur Desvanneaux to combine very agreeably the discharge of his official duties with the making of pleasant acquaintances!" "The object of my action in this matter is above all suspicion," remarked the churchwarden, with great dignity, while his wife darted toward him a furious glance. "You?
20th. I think a good likely girl, and a parish child of St. Bride's, of honest parentage, and recommended by the churchwarden. After dinner among my joyners laying my floors, which please me well, and so to my office, and we sat this afternoon upon an extraordinary business of victualling.
Last of all I led the glorious hymn, "When in greatest need we be," which was no sooner finished than my new churchwarden, Claus Bulk of Uekeritze, who had formerly been a groom with his lordship, and whom he had now put into a farm, ran off to Pudgla, and told him all that had taken place in the church.
From the general narrative there stood out little pictures of individual persons or scenes, clear cut and masterly of his father, the Gainsborough churchwarden; of his Methodistical mother, who had all her life lamented her own beauty as a special snare of Satan, and who since her husband's death had refused to see her son on the ground that his opinions 'had vexed his father; of his first ardent worship of knowledge, and passion to communicate it; and of the first intuitions in lecture, face to face with an undergraduate, alone in college rooms, sometimes alone on Alpine heights, of something cold, impotent, and baffling in himself, which was to stand for ever between him and action, between him and human affection; the growth of the critical pessimist sense which laid the axe to the root of enthusiasm after enthusiasm, friendship after friendship which made other men feel him inhuman, intangible, a skeleton at the feast; and the persistence through it all of a kind of hunger for life and its satisfactions, which the will was more and more powerless to satisfy: all those Langham put into words with an extraordinary magic and delicacy of phrase.
Then he scratched his left whisker with the stem of his churchwarden pipe and looked severely over at Mr. Tredgold. "I don't think you ought to talk that way before ladies," he said, primly. "Of course, I know you're only in joke, but there's some people can't see jokes as quick as others and they might get a wrong idea of you."
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