And what is he?
The parson of a potty parish of a couple of hundred people, counting the babies and the softies, and half of them Dissenters or Salvation Army.

Moreover, they can't be bullied, because if they were they'd just walk into the next chapel door.

Of course, there's the young gentlemen, and he takes it out of them, but, Lord bless us! that's like kicking a wool sack, of which any man of spirit soon gets tired.

So, you see, he is sick-hearted, and will be more so now that you have stood up to him; and, in this way or that, it's the same with everyone, none of us gets what we want, while of what we don't want there's always plenty." While the old lady held forth thus in her little room which, although she did not know it, had once been the penitential cell of the Abbey, wherein for hundreds of years many unhappy ones had reflected in a very similar vein, she was engaged in trying key after key upon a stout oak chest.

It was part of the ancient furniture of the place, that indeed in former days had served as the receptacle for hair shirts, scourges and other physical inducements to repentance and piety.
Now it had a different purpose and held Mrs.Parsons' best dresses, also, in a bandbox, an ornament preserved from her wedding-cake, for once in the far past she was married to a sailor, a very great black-guard, who came to his end by tumbling from a gangway when he was drunk.