and vigorous biography of some man of the
people--of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas Cooper or John Bright, or
even of Thomas Carlyle.

One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flaxman, hearing from
Rose of the success of the experiment, went down to hear his new
acquaintance tell the story of Monte Cristo's escape from the Chateau
d'If. He started an hour earlier than was necessary, and with an
admirable impartiality he spent that hour at St. Wilfrid's hearing
vespers. Flaxman had a passion for intellectual or social novelty; and
this passion was beguiling him into a close observation of Elsmere. At
the same time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fastidious
conservative fibres, and when his friends talked rationalism, it often
gave him a vehement pleasure to maintain that a good Catholic or
Ritualist service was worth all their arguments, and would outlast them.
His taste drew him to the Church, so did a love of opposition to current
'isms.' Bishops counted on him for subscriptions, and High Church
divines sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions,
but it should be added that with equal regularity _he_ dropped the
pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very
decipherable person in religious matters--as Rose had already
discovered.

The change from the dim and perfumed spaces of St. Wilfrid's to the bare
warehouse room with its packed rows of listeners was striking enough.
Here were no bowed figures, no _recueillement_. In the blaze of crude
light every eager eye was fixed upon the slight elastic figure on the
platform, each change in the expressive face, each gesture of the long
arms and thin flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, the
attentive silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. At one point a
band of young roughs at the back made a disturbance, but their
neighbours had the offenders quelled and out in a twinkling, and the
room cried out for a repetition of the sentences which had been lost in
the noise. When Dantes, opening his knife with his teeth, managed to cut
the strings of the sack, a gasp of relief ran through the crowd; when at
last he reached _terra firma_ there was a ringing cheer.

'What is he, d'ye know?' Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbour, as
Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb
in the story-teller's direction meanwhile. 'Seems like a parson somehow.
But he ain't a parson.'