Sundays and
every Wednesday evening he wore a stove-pipe hat and a long frock
coat of antique and rusty aspect. On his way to church--with
hospitality even for the like of him, thank God!--he walked slowly
with head bent until, remembering his great agility and strength,
he began to run, giving a varied exhibition of skips and jumps
terminating in a sort of gallop. Once in the sacred house he
looked to right and left accusingly, and aloft with encouraging
applause. His God was one of wrath, vengeance, and destruction;
his hell the destination of his enemies. They who resented the
screw of his avarice, and pulled their thumbs away; they who
treated him with contempt, and whose faults, compared to his own,
were as a mound to a mountain--they were all to burn with
everlasting fire, while he, on account of that happy thought the
day of the sheep-shearing, was to sit forever with the angels in
heaven.
"Ye're going t' heaven, I hear," said Darrel, who had repaired a
clock for him, and heard complaint of his small fee.
"I am," was the spirited reply.
"God speed ye!" said the tinker, as he went away.
In such disfavour was the poor man, that all would have been glad
to have him go anywhere, so he left Hillsborough.
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