But as soon as he was convinced that a thing was right, he "shut his eyes and ran and butted at it like a ram," as Captain James once expressed it, in talking over something Mr.Gray had done.

People in the village said, "they never knew what the parson would be at next;" or they might have said, "where his reverence would next turn up." For I have heard of his marching right into the middle of a set of poachers, gathered together for some desperate midnight enterprise, or walking into a public-house that lay just beyond the bounds of my lady's estate, and in that extra- parochial piece of ground I named long ago, and which was considered the rendezvous of all the ne'er-do-weel characters for miles round, and where a parson and a constable were held in much the same kind of esteem as unwelcome visitors.

And yet Mr.Gray had his long fits of depression, in which he felt as if he were doing nothing, making no way in his work, useless and unprofitable, and better out of the world than in it.

In comparison with the work he had set himself to do, what he did seemed to be nothing.

I suppose it was constitutional, those attacks of lowness of spirits which he had about this time; perhaps a part of the nervousness which made him always so awkward when he came to the Hall.