He loved
the rector, therefore the rector's clock could not be wrong. Evidently
Dixon was capable of strong affection, a quality of no mean moral order.
Before the enclosure of parishes was common, and their various fields
separated by hedges or other fences; before, too, the ordnance survey
with its many calculations was an accomplished fact, much more measuring
of land in connection with work done each year was required than at
present. It was a necessity, therefore, that each village should have in
or near it a man skilled in the science of calculation. Consequently,
the acquirement of figures was fostered, and so in the earlier part of
the nineteenth century almost every parish could produce a man supposed
to be, and who probably was, great in arithmetic. Catwick's calculator
was Dixon, and he was generally thought by his co-villagers to be as
learned a one as any other, if not more so.
He had, however, a great rival at Long Riston. This was one Richard
Fewson, who, like Dixon, was clerk of his parish; but while Dixon was a
shopkeeper Fewson kept the village school.
Fewson's modes of punishing refractory scholars were somewhat peculiar.
Either a culprit was hoisted on the back of another scholar, or made to
stoop till his nose entered a hole in the desk, and when in one or other
of these positions was made to feel the singular sensation caused by a
sound caning on that particular part of his anatomy which it is said
"nature intends for correction.
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