In front of the fire sat the Carrier, with nearly all of his best clothes on, and gazing at a warming-pan. He had been forbidden to eat his supper, for fear of making a smell of it; and he had a great mind to go to bed, and have some hot coals under him. For nearly five miles of uphill work and laying his shoulder against the spokes, he had been promising himself a rare good supper, and a pipe to follow; and now where were they? In the far background. He had no idea of rebellion; still that saucepan on the simmer made the most provoking movements. Therefore he put up his feet upon a stump of oak (which had for generations cooled down pots), and he turned with a shake of his head toward the fire, and sniffed the sniff of Tantalus, and muttered--"Ah, well! the Lord knoweth best!" and thought to himself that if ever again he invited the quality to his house, he would wait till he had his own quantity first.
Esther was quite in a flutter; although she was ready to deny it stoutly, and to blush a bright red in doing so. To her, of course, Justice Overshute was simply a great man, who must have the chair of state, and the talk of restraint, and a clean dry hearth, and the curtsy, and the best white apron of deference. To her it could make not one jot of difference, that Mr. Overshute happened to be the most intimate friend of some other gentleman, who never came near her, except in dreams. Tush, she had the very greatest mind, when the house was clean and tidy, to go and spend the evening with her dear friend Mealy at the Anvil. But Zacchary would not hear of this; and how could she go against Zacchary?
So she brought the grand chair, the arm-chair of yew-tree--the tree that used to shade the graves of unrecorded Crippses--a chair of deepest red complexion, countenanced with a cushion. The cushion was but a little pad in the dark capacious hollow; suggesting to an innocent mind, that a lean man had left his hat there, and a fat man had sat down on it. But the mind of every Cripps yet known was strictly reverential; and this was the curule chair, and even the Olympian throne of Crippses.
Russel Overshute knocked at the door, in his usual quick and impetuous way. In the main he was a gentleman; and he would have knocked at a nobleman's door exactly as he did at the Carrier's. But all radical theories, fine as they are, detract from gentle practice; and the too-large-minded man, while young, takes a flying leap over small niceties. He does not remember that poor men need more deference than rich men, because they are not used to it. To put it more plainly--Overshute knocked hard, and meant no harm by it.