The flunkey nature was nowhere completely subdued but in his stomach, and he still divided society into gentry, gentry's flunkeys, and the people who provided for them.

A clergyman without a flunkey was an anomaly, belonging to neither of these classes.

Mr.Fitchett had an irrepressible tendency to drowsiness under spiritual instruction, and in the recurrent regularity with which he dozed off until he nodded and awaked himself, he looked not unlike a piece of mechanism, ingeniously contrived for measuring the length of Mr.Barton's discourse.
Perfectly wide-awake, on the contrary, was his left-hand neighbour, Mrs.
Brick, one of those hard undying old women, to whom age seems to have given a network of wrinkles, as a coat of magic armour against the attacks of winters, warm or cold.

The point on which Mrs.Brick was still sensitive--the theme on which you might possibly excite her hope and fear--was snuff.

It seemed to be an embalming powder, helping her soul to do the office of salt.
And now, eke out an audience of which this front benchful was a sample, with a certain number of refractory children, over whom Mr.Spratt, the master of the workhouse, exercised an irate surveillance, and I think you will admit that the university-taught clergyman, whose office it is to bring home the gospel to a handful of such souls, has a sufficiently hard task.