It was impossible to deny that the good woman's estimate of our station and business was shrewd enough. We were certainly a pair of vagrants, if ever there was a pair in the world, and were certainly come to get something of the parson that we had no means of requiting him for. And I am sure neither of us, singly or together, would have stood a chance of melting that adamantine bosom, since everything we said seemed more clearly to reveal our humble not to say destitute condition; indeed we had come to the point where this clergyman's uncompromising guardian was about to bang the door in our faces, when the parson himself made a very welcome intervention. He came shuffling along the path from some remote part of the vicarage garden, in a pair of old down-trodden carpet slippers, wearing over an old-fashioned wig a beaver grotesquely battered and green with age. His cassock hung in tatters at his heels, and he made about as unkempt and disreputable a figure of a clergyman as it was possible to conceive. Besides, he was a very small and insignificant rat of a fellow, and had a strange odd way of peering through his horn spectacles. But the moment he began to speak such a pleasant twinkle of courtesy came into his ugly countenance--by itself it was plain to the point of ugliness, although to this day Cynthia will never allow it to be so--and his voice was so wondrous musical, that straightway we forgot that he had such a singular appearance, and fell in love with him. "A very good morning to you," says he. "I hope you are drinking in this golden morning that God hath sent us. Hey, what a thing it is to be a human being!" As he came up and observed Cynthia more closely, he, bowed with a wonderful grave dignity, and took off his hat with a flourish that became him most inimitably well. Such courtesy from an appearance so discourteous never was seen. "La, master, what be you at?" says the woman, highly scandalized by so polite a demeanour. "Do you not see these are an arrant pair of vagrant beggars? I must get you more artful spectacles if you will stay so close at your book-reading."