Pipkin was so overcome with reverence and awe, when the aforesaid

bishop laid his hand on his head, that he fainted right clean away,

and was borne out of church in the arms of the beadle.

This was a great event, a tremendous era, in Nathaniel Pipkin's life,

and it was the only one that had ever occurred to ruffle the smooth

current of his quiet existence, when happening one fine afternoon, in

a fit of mental abstraction, to raise his eyes from the slate on which he

was devising some tremendous problem in compound addition for an

offending urchin to solve, they suddenly rested on the blooming

countenance of Maria Lobbs, the only daughter of old Lobbs, the great

saddler over the way. Now, the eyes of Mr Pipkin had rested on the

pretty face of Maria Lobbs many a time and oft before, at church and

elsewhere; but the eyes of Maria Lobbs had never looked so bright, the

cheeks of Maria Lobbs had never looked so ruddy, as upon this

particular occasion. No wonder then, that Nathaniel Pipkin was

unable to take his eyes from the countenance of Miss Lobbs; no

wonder that Miss Lobbs, finding herself stared at by a young man,

withdrew her head from the window out of which she had been

peeping, and shut the casement and pulled down the blind; no

wonder that Nathaniel Pipkin, immediately thereafter, fell upon the

young urchin who had previously offended, and cuffed and knocked

him about to his heart's content. All this was very natural, and there's

nothing at all to wonder at about it.

It IS matter of wonder, though, that anyone of Mr Nathaniel Pipkin's

retiring disposition, nervous temperament, and most particularly

diminutive income, should from this day forth, have dared to aspire to

the hand and heart of the only daughter of the fiery old Lobbs - of old

Lobbs, the great saddler, who could have bought up the whole village

at one stroke of his pen, and never felt the outlay - old Lobbs, who

was well known to have heaps of money, invested in the bank at the

nearest market town - who was reported to have countless and

inexhaustible treasures hoarded up in the little iron safe with the big

keyhole, over the chimney-piece in the back parlour - and who, it was

well known, on festive occasions garnished his board with a real silver

teapot, cream-ewer, and sugar-basin, which he was wont, in the pride

of his heart, to boast should be his daughter's property when she

found a man to her mind. I repeat it, to be matter of profound

astonishment and intense wonder, that Nathaniel Pipkin should have

had the temerity to cast his eyes in this direction. But love is blind;

and Nathaniel had a cast in his eye; and perhaps these two

circumstances, taken together, prevented his seeing the matter in its

proper light.

Now, if old Lobbs had entertained the most remote or distant idea of

the state of the affections of Nathaniel Pipkin, he would just have

razed the school-room to the ground, or exterminated its master from

The Pickwick Papers