e moment of his arrival in the parish, Henslowe had made him the
target of a vulgar and embittered hostility, and so far as he had struck
out in return it had been for the protection of persecuted and
defenceless creatures. But all the same, he could not get the thought of
the man's collapse and humiliation out of his mind. How at his age was
he to find other work, and how was he to endure life at Murewell without
his comfortable house, his smart gig, his easy command of spirits, and
the cringing of the farmers?

Tormented by the sordid misery of the situation almost as though it had
been his own, Elsmere ran down impulsively in the evening to the agent's
house. Could nothing be done to assure the man that he was not really
his enemy, and that anything the parson's influence and the parson's
money could do to help him to a more decent life, and work which offered
fewer temptations and less power over human beings, should be done?

It need hardly be said that the visit was a complete failure. Henslowe,
who was drinking hard, no sooner heard Elsmere's voice in the little
hall than he dashed open the door which separated them, and, in a
paroxysm of drunken rage, hurled at Elsmere all the venomous stuff he
had been garnering up for months against some such occasion. The vilest
abuse, the foulest charges--there was nothing that the maddened sot, now
fairly unmasked, denied himself. Elsmere, pale and erect, tried to make
himself heard. In vain. Henslowe was physically incapable of taking in a
word.

At last the agent, beside himself, made a rush, his three untidy
children, who had been hanging open-mouthed in the background, set up a
howl of terror, and his Scotch wife, more pinched and sour than ever,
who had been so far a gloomy spectator of the scene, interposed.

'Have doon wi' ye,' she said sullenly, putting out a long bony arm in
front of her husband, 'or I'll just lock oop that brandy where ye'll naw
find it if ye pull the house doon. Now, sir,' turning to Elsmere, 'would
ye jest be going? Ye mean it weel, I daur say, but ye've doon yer wark,
and ye maun leave it.'

And she motioned him out, not without a sombre dignity. Elsmere went
home crestfallen. The enthusiast is a good deal too apt to
under-estimate the stubbornness of moral fact, and these rebuffs have
their stern uses for character.

'They intend to go on living here, I am told,' Elsmere said, as he wound
up the story, 'and as Henslowe is still churchwar