A SPIRIT STIRRED. 395 



even his jaws, to the evident discomfiture of poor Mrs. Dove, 

 abating nothing of their usual mechanic labour on the reduced 

 material supplied by her impoverished larder. Yet something 

 of a change (the result indirect of that in his master's fortune) 

 had been wrought even on the unimpressible temperament of 

 the caligraphic butler. My uncle's Sunday duty was performed 

 in his absence by a divine of a stamp altogether different to 

 himself; a loud, alarming thunderer one who shook the 

 dust from the old moth-eaten pulpit-cushion, and from the ivy 

 which hung over it a rough tool with a double edge of zeal 

 and sincerity, and powerful to cut into the heart through hard 

 horny rinds of ignorance and apathy. Even Caleb, the dull, 

 prosaic, matter-of-fact, circumscribed old Caleb, with whom, in 

 its strictest sense, to see, and nothing else, was to believe, had 

 had, through the instrumentality of this new teacher, the blind 

 eyes of his inner man so far opened as to have caught a glimpse 

 of certain somethings besides formal penmanship, neat beds of 

 onions and carrots, and files of books in goodly array, under 

 his own drill and discipline. For Sabbath mornings, fifty 

 times fifty-two, he had sat under his poor master, and repeated 

 with the clerk, and in as loud a key, the creed and the 

 responses, and even in sermon time never closed his great 

 fixed eyes, which seemed like an insect's without eyelids ; yet 

 his mind had acquired no more power of grasping aught in- 

 visible, of conceiving, however vaguely, of other worlds, of 

 spirits therein, or of spirits that may be " walking the earth 



