Here, again, was a sight that had never been beheld, or dreamt of, before, in the parish of Stow: but as strange and indecorous a sight as it was, it was one that many a rural spectator declared he wouldn't have missed for a quart of ale!--The very mourners for the dead were compelled to hide their laughing faces with their white handkerchiefs,--for the grotesque wrestling of the rival clerks, and their looks of rage, as they together grasped and tugged at the prayer-book, put weeping out of the question. The parson had got through--"I said I will take heed to my ways,"--and wanted to begin--"Lord, thou hast been our refuge,"--but there stood the wrestlers, grasping, and pulling, and panting, and sweating,--and it was a most difficult thing to say which would be likely to beat. Many a stout farmer that shook his sides,--for the laugh became broad and general, in spite of the solemnity of the occasion,--longed to shout out, "A crown to a groat upon Middleton!"--but restrained himself. At length,--the genuine, hereditary spirit of the true "Parish Clerk" prevailed!--he possessed the book: the "Parson's Clerk" sought a seat, to take his breath;--and Clerk William, panting, and wiping the streaming perspiration from his comely and heroic brow, proceeded to echo the "Confession" after the Perpetual Curate. Such was the cause of the "action" brought by Spurr (at the direction, and by the ghostly advice of the Perpetual Curate) against Middleton at the succeeding sessions,--an action of "assault committed by the said Middleton upon him the said Spurr, while in the performance of duty." The jury, on this occasion,--to make short of the narrative,--sat till eleven at night,--the Court rang with laughter for hours,--and the affair was, at last, got rid of,--by some legal resort, and Spurr (or his advisers) were saddled with costs. _That_ was a conclusion that "gravelled" Spurr, as he said, on leaving the Court; and the Perpetual Curate was also "gravelled"--though he did not use the same expression; and they each showed it, soon after their second return to the old seat of war. But another slight event must first be chronicled, ere the several succeeding and exalted doings of the "Parson's Clerk" and the Perpetual Curate are narrated.