seized upon that good
man's brain; he had half emptied Salem Chapel, there could be no doubt;
but, on the other hand, he had more than half filled the Chapel of St
Roque, half a mile out of Carlingford, where the perpetual curate, young,
handsome, and fervid, was on the very topmost pinnacle of Anglicanism.
St Roque's was not more than a pleasant walk from the best quarter of
Carlingford, on the north side of the town, thank heaven! which one
could get at without the dread passage of that new horrid suburb, to
which young Mr Rider, the young doctor, was devoting himself. But the
Evangelical rector was dead, and his reign was over, and nobody could
predict what the character of the new administration was to be. The
obscurity in which the new Rector had buried his views was the most
extraordinary thing about him. He had taken high honours at college,
and was "highly spoken of;" but whether he was High, or Low, or Broad,
muscular or sentimental, sermonising or decorative, nobody in the world
seemed able to tell.

"Fancy if he were just to be a Mr Bury over again! Fancy him going to
the canal, and having sermons to the bargemen, and attending to all
sorts of people except to us, whom it is his duty to attend to!" cried
one of this much-canvassed clergyman's curious parishioners. "Indeed I
do believe he must be one of these people. If he were in society at all,
somebody would be sure to know."

"Lucy dear, Mr Bury christened you," said another not less curious but
more tolerant inquirer.

"Then he did you the greatest of all services," cried the third member
of the little group which discussed the new Rector under Mr Wodehouse's
blossomed apple-trees. "He conferred such a benefit upon you that he
deserves all reverence at your hand. Wonderful idea! a man confers this
greatest of Christian blessings on multitudes, and does not himself
appreciate the boon he conveys!"

"Well, for that matter, Mr Wentworth, you know----" said the elder lady;
but she got no farther. Though she was verging upon forty, leisurely,
pious, and unmarried, that good Miss Wodehouse was not polemical. She
had "her own opinions," but few people knew much about them. She was
seated on a green garden-bench which surrounded the great May-tree in
that large, warm, well-furnished garden. The high brick walls, all
clothed with fruit-trees, shut in an enclosure of which not a morsel
except this velvet grass, with its nests of daisies, was not under the
high