erburn the rude statesmen provoked and defied
him with loud contempt; at Beechhurst his congregation dwindled down to
the gentlefolks, who tolerated him out of respect to his office, and to
the aged poor, who received a weekly dole of bread, bequeathed by some
long-ago benefactor; and these were mostly women. Mr. Carnegie was a
fair sample of the men, and he made no secret of his aversion.

The Reverend Askew Wiley, see him as he paces the lawn, his supple back
writhed just a little towards my lady deferentially, his head just a
little on one side, lending her an ear. By the gait of him he is looking
another way. Yes; for now my lady turns, he turns too, and they halt
front to front; his pallid visage half averted from her observation, his
glittering eyes roving with bold stealth over the populous garden, and
his thin-lipped, scarlet mouth working and twisting incessantly in the
covert of his thick-set beard.

My lady speaks with an impatience scarcely controlled. She is the great
lady of Beechhurst, the Dowager Lady Latimer, in the local estimation a
very great lady indeed; once a leader in society, now retired from it,
and living obscurely on her rich dower in the Forest, with almsdeeds and
works of patronage and improvement for her pleasure and her occupation.
My lady always loved her own way, but she had worked harmoniously with
Mr. Hutton through his year's incumbency. He was sufficient for his
duties, and gave her no opportunity for the exercise of unlawful
authority, no ground for encroachments, no room for interference. But it
was very different with poor Mr. Wiley. Everybody knew that he was a
trial to her. He could not hold his own against her propensity to
dictate. He deferred to her, and contrived to thwart her, to do the very
thing she would not have done, and to do it in the most obnoxious way.
The puzzle was--could he help it? Was he one of those tactless persons
who are for ever blundering, or had he the will to assert himself, and
not the pluck to do it boldly? His refuge was in round-about
manoeuvres, and my lady felt towards him as those intolerant
Cumberland statesmen felt before their enmity made the bleak moorland
too hot for him. He was called an able man, but his foibles were
precisely of the sort to create in the large-hearted of the gentle sex
an almost masculine antipathy to their spiritual pastor. Bessie Fairfax
could not bear him, and she could render a reason. Mr. Wiley received
pupils to