ways and only treads the path of
high principle when self-interest points him in the same direction.

The school career of the future pastor was not, therefore, a very happy
one, for at school there are no feeble women to be captivated by
heartrending revelations of a noble nature at war with universal
wickedness, and all but shattered by the assaults of an unfeeling world.
Nor, strange to say, do schoolmasters, as a rule, value the boy who ranges
himself on their side in the eternal war between boys and masters. However,
he proceeded in due time to a University. There he let it be known that his
ultimate destination was the Church, but he had his own method of
qualifying for his profession. He was not afflicted with the possession of
great muscular strength, or of a very robust health. Neither the river nor
the football-field attracted him. Cricket was a bore, athletic sports were
a burden; the rough manners of the ordinary Undergraduates made him
shudder. However, since at College there are sets of all sorts and sizes,
he soon managed to fashion for himself a little world of effete and mincing
idlers, who adored themselves even more than they worshipped one another.
They drank deep from the well of modern French literature, and chattered
interminably of RICHEPIN, GUY DE MAUPASSANT, PAUL BOURGET, and the rest.
They themselves were their own favourite native writers; but their morbid
sonnets, their love-lorn elegies, their versified mixtures of passion and a
quasi-religious mysticism, were too sacred for print, though they were
sometimes adapted to thin and fluttering airs, and sung to sympathisers in
private. Most of these gentlemen were "ploughed" in their examination, but
the hero of this sketch secured his degree without honours, and departed to
read for the Church.

Soon afterwards he was ordained, was plunged ruthlessly into an East-End
parish, and disappeared for a time from view. He emerged, after an interval
of several years. The occasion was the inaugural meeting of a Guild for the
Conversion of Music-hall _Artistes_, which is to this day spoken of amongst
the irreverent as the Song and Sermon Society. The sensation of the meeting
was caused by the fervent speech of a clergyman, who announced that he
himself had been for some months a professional Variety Singer, attached to
more than one Music-hall, and that, having studied the life _de pres_, he
knew all its temptations, and was therefore qualified to speak f