Everybody may be sure that I never would have gone out of the way to describe my traffic with that man unless there were good reason. Nay, but I wanted to show you exactly the cast and the colour of man he was, by setting forth his low attempt to get my fish for nothing. There was no man, of course, in my native village, and very few in Bridgend perhaps, to whom I would have sold those fish, unless they were going to sell it again. But Hezekiah Perkins, a member and leading elder of the "Nicodemus-Christians," was so hard a man to cheat--except by stirring of his gall--and so keen a cheat himself; so proud, moreover, of his wit and praying, and truly brotherly,--that to lead him astray was the very first thing desired by a sound Churchman. By trade and calling he had been--before he received his special call--no more than a common blacksmith. Now a blacksmith is a most useful man, full of news and full of jokes, and very often by no means drunk; this, however, was not enough to satisfy Hezekiah. Having parts, as he always told us--and sometimes we wished that he had no whole--cultivated parts, moreover, and taken up by the gentry, nothing of a lower order came up to his merits than to call himself as follows: "Horologist, Gunsmith, Practical Turner, Working Goldsmith and Jeweller, Maker of all Machinery, and Engineman to the King and Queen." The first time he put this over his door, all the neighbours laughed at him, knowing (in spite of the book he had got full of figures and shapes and crossings, which he called "Three-gun-ometry") that his education was scarcely up to the rule of three, without any guns. Nevertheless he got on well, having sense enough to guide him when to talk large (in the presence of people who love large talk, as beyond them), and when to sing small, and hold his tongue, and nod at the proper distances, if ever his business led him among gentry of any sense or science, such as we sometimes hear of. Hence it was that he got the order to keep the church-clock of Bridgend a-going by setting the hands on twice a-day, and giving a push to the pendulum; and so long as the clock would only go, nobody in the town cared a tick whether it kept right time or wrong. And if people from the country durst say anything about it, it was always enough to ask them what their own clocks had to say.