And then, before I knew where I was the quiet room was turned into something between a pantomime and a pandemonium by those two.

Chairs were flung over with a crash, tables were vaulted with a noise like thunder, screens were smashed, crockery scattered in smithereens, and still Basil Grant bounded and bellowed after the Rev.Ellis Shorter.
And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last half-witted touch to my mystification.

The Rev.Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously noticed him to behave, or as, considering his age and station, I should have expected him to behave.

His power of dodging, leaping, and fighting would have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in this doddering old vicar looked like a sort of farcical fairy-tale.

Moreover, he did not seem to be so much astonished as I had thought.