DISSENT WITHOUT DIFFERFNCE 57 



Saturday, i$th June 1863. 



This morning we did our usual lessons. Mr Heron has not 

 come back yet. Tom and I went again to teach the children. 



Such a happy family was all the village of Coxwold 

 that Mr Scott used to allow free use of this schoolroom 

 which was actually part of the ground floor of the vicarage 

 for Nonconformist services, there being no chapel in the 

 village. There was really no Dissent, for the people used 

 to go to church in the morning and to the schoolroom 

 chapel in the evening. A very different spirit prevailed at 

 Kilvington and Thirsk, where a " Methody parson " was 

 always regarded as a man of dubious morality, and to this 

 day I find it difficult to clear myself of an instinctive 

 hatred of the Nonconformist conscience and all its works, 

 this feeling having been bred in me and strengthened by 

 early environment. 



A worthy man called George Smith was the chief of such 

 Nonconformists as there were at Coxwold, but there was 

 no Nonconformist bitterness about him, and he and the 

 vicar were the best of friends. George Smith was much 

 given to recitations on the subject of temperance, one of 

 which began : 



A toper sat in a tap-room nook 



He was cheerful, vivacious and gay. 

 He had two pounds ten in his pocket just then 



He had pawned his watch that day ! 



Suicide was the ultimate fate of the toper, and when the 

 " startled neighbours," hearing the shot, rushed to see 

 what had happened they found nothing in cupboard or 

 pantry but 



One half-empty cup of cider, 



which the toper, it would seem, had been unable to 

 finish before shooting himself. He cannot have been 

 such a desperate toper if cider was his beverage, but 

 George Smith thought nothing of that. Anything 

 alcoholic was in his view equally pernicious. He was a 



