rom
experience as to the best means of elevating those who pursued it. The
details of his story, as they fell from the mouth of the reverend speaker,
were highly spiced. His hearers were amused, interested, and stirred; and,
when a daily newspaper gave a headlined account of the speech, with a
portrait of the speaker, the professional fortune of the Adulated Clergyman
(for it was he) was assured.

Shortly afterwards his biography appeared in a series published in a weekly
periodical under the title of _Unconventional Clerics_, and he himself
wrote a touching letter on "The Plague Spots of Nova Zembla," in which an
eloquent appeal was made for subscriptions on behalf of the inhabitants of
that chill and neglected region. Ladies now began to say to one another:
"Have you heard Mr. So-and-So preach? Really, not? Oh, you should. He's so
wonderful, so convincing, so unlike all others. You must come with me next
Sunday," and thus gradually he gathered round him in his remote church a
band of faithful women, drawn from the West End by the fame of his
unconventional eloquence. A not too fastidious critic might, perhaps, have
been startled by a note of vulgarity in his references to sacred events, as
well as by the tone of easy and intimate familiarity with which he spoke of
those whose names are generally mentioned with bated breath, and printed
with capital letters; but the most refined women seemed to find in all this
an additional fascination. His sermons dealt in language which was at the
same time plain and highly-coloured. He denounced his congregation roundly
as the meanest of sinners. To the women he was particularly merciless. He
tore to rags their little vesture of self-respect, shattered their nerves
with emotional appeals, harrowed all their feelings, and belaboured them so
violently with prophecies of wrath, that they left church, after shedding
gallons of tears and emptying their expiatory purses into the
subscription-plate, in a state of pale but pious pulp. In the
drawing-rooms, however, to which he afterwards resorted, his manner
changed. His voice became soft; he poured oil into the wounds he had
inflicted. "How are you to-day?" he would say, in his caressing way. "Is
the neuralgia any better? And the dulness of spirits? has meditation
prevailed over it? Ah me! it is the lot of the good to suffer, and silence,
perhaps, were best." Whereupon he is treated as a Father Confessor of
domestic troubles, and persuades