ny
further inquiry. He would submit to the bishop, let the bishop's
decision be what it might. Things were different since the day on
which he had refused Mr. Thumble admission to his pulpit. At that time
people believed him to be innocent, and he so believed of himself.
Now, people believed him to be guilty, and it could not be right that
a man held in such slight esteem could exercise the functions of
a parish priest, let his own opinion of himself be what it might.
He would submit himself, and go anywhere,--to the galleys or the
workhouse, if they wished it. As for his wife and children, they
would, he said to himself, be better without him than with him. The
world would never be so hard to a woman or to children as it had been
to him.

He was sitting saturated with rain,--saturated also with
thinking,--and quite unobservant of anything around him, when he
was accosted by an old man from Hoggle End, with whom he was well
acquainted. "Thee be wat, Master Crawley," said the old man.

"Wet!" said Crawley, recalled suddenly back to the realities of life.
"Well,--yes. I am wet. That's because it's raining."

"Thee be teeming o' wat. Hadn't thee better go whome?"

"And are you not wet also," said Mr. Crawley, looking at the old man,
who had been at work in the brickfield, and who was soaked with mire,
and from whom there seemed to come a steam of muddy mist.

"Is it me, yer reverence? I'm wat in course. The loikes of us is
always wat,--that is barring the insides of us. It comes to us
natural to have the rheumatics. How is one of us to help hisself
against having on 'em? But there ain't no call for the loikes of you
to have the rheumatics."

"My friend," said Crawley, who was now standing on the road,--and
as he spoke he put out his arm and took the brickmaker by the hand,
"there is a worse complaint than rheumatism,--there is, indeed."

"There's what they calls the collerer," said Giles Hoggett, looking
up into Mr. Crawley's face. "That ain't a-got hold of yer?"

"Ay, and worse than the cholera. A man is killed all over when he is
struck in his pride--and yet he lives."

"Maybe that's bad enough too," said Giles, with his hand still held
by the other.

"It is bad enough," said Mr. Crawley, striking his breast with his
left hand. "It is bad enough."

"Tell 'ee what, Master Crawley;--and yer reverence mustn't think as
I means to be preaching; there ain't nowt a man can't bear if he'll
only be dogged. You go w