"Had he only robbed the mail-coach, or broken into a gentleman's house, the offence might have been expiable; but to rob a clergyman, and a rector too!--Oh, the sacrilegious dog!" "Your warmth does you honour, sir," said the doctor, beginning now to recover; "and I am very proud to have made the acquaintance of a gentleman of such truly religious opinions." "Ah!" cried the stranger, "my foible, sir,--if I may so speak,--is a sort of enthusiastic fervour for the Protestant Establishment.

Nay, sir, I never come across the very nave of the church without feeling an indescribable emotion--a kind of sympathy, as it were--with--with--you understand me, sir--I fear I express myself ill." "Not at all, not at all!" exclaimed the doctor: "such sentiments are uncommon in one so young." "Sir, I learned them early in life from a friend and preceptor of mine, Mr.MacGrawler, and I trust they may continue with me to my dying day." Here the doctor's servant entered with (we borrow a phrase from the novel of -- --------) "the tea-equipage;" and Mrs.Slopperton, betaking herself to its superintendence, inquired with more composure than hitherto had belonged to her demeanour, what sort of a looking creature the ruffian was.
"I will tell you, my dear, I will tell you, Miss Lucy, all about it.
I was walking home from Mr.Slowforth's, with his money in my pocket, thinking, my love, of buying you that topaz cross you wished to have." "Dear, good man!" cried Mrs.Slopperton; "what a fiend it must have been to rob so excellent a creature!" "And," resumed the doctor, "it also occurred to me that the Madeira was nearly out,--the Madeira, I mean, with the red seal; and I was thinking it might not be amiss to devote part of the money to buy six dozen more; and the remainder, my love, which would be about one pound eighteen, I thought I would divide--'for he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord!'-- among the thirty poor families on the common; that is, if they behaved well, and the apples in the back garden were not feloniously abstracted!" "Excellent, charitable man!" ejaculated Mrs.Slopperton.

"While I was thus meditating, I lifted my eyes, and saw before me two men,--one of prodigious height, and with a great profusion of hair about his shoulders; the other was smaller, and wore his hat slouched over his face: it was a very large hat.

My attention was arrested by the singularity of the tall person's hair, and while I was smiling at its luxuriance, I heard him say to his companion, 'Well, Augustus, as you are such a moral dog, he is in your line, not mine; so I leave him to you.' Little did I think those words related to me.

No sooner were they uttered than the tall rascal leaped over a gate and disappeared; the other fellow, then marching up to me, very smoothly asked me the way to the church, and while I was explaining to him to turn first to the right and then to the left, and so on,--for the best way is, you know, exceedingly crooked,--the hypocritical scoundrel seized me by the collar, and cried out, 'Your money or your life!' I do assure you that I never trembled so much,--not, my dear Miss Lucy, so much for my own sake, as for the sake of the thirty poor families on the common, whose wants it had been my intention to relieve.