Once vested with the paternal commission to rebuke, prohibit, and lecture, as the spiritual pastor and master of Mr.Thorpe's disobedient son, Mr.Yollop flourished in his new vocation in exact proportion to the resistance offered to the exercise of his authority.

He derived a grim encouragement from the wildest explosions of Zack's fury at being interfered with by a man who had no claim of relationship over him, and who gloried, professionally, in experimenting on him, as a finely-complicated case of spiritual disease.
Thrice did Mr.Yollop, in his capacity of a moral surgeon, operate on his patient, and triumph in the responsive yells which his curative exertions elicited.

At the fourth visit of attendance, however, every angry symptom suddenly and marvelously disappeared before the first significant flourish of the clerical knife.

Mr.Yollop had triumphed where Mr.Thorpe had failed! The case which had defied lay treatment had yielded to the parsonic process of cure; and Zack, the rebellious, was tamed at last into spending his evenings in decorous dullness at home! It never occurred to Mr.Yollop to doubt, or to Mr.Thorpe to ascertain, whether the young gentleman really went to bed, after he had retired obediently, at the proper hour, to his sleeping room.

They saw him come home from business sullenly docile and speechlessly subdued, take his dinner and his book in the evening, and go up stairs quietly, after the house door had been bolted for the night.