't poach if the right of shooting be accorded to
him. Mr. Puddleham had not been quite happy in his mind amidst the
ease and amiable relations which Mr. Fenwick enforced upon him, and
had long since begun to feel that a few cabbages and peaches did not
repay him for the loss of those pleasant and bitter things, which it
would have been his to say in his daily walks and from the pulpit of
his Salem, had he not been thus hampered, confined, and dominated.
Hitherto he had hardly gained a single soul from under Mr. Fenwick's
grasp,--had indeed on the balance lost his grasp on souls, and was
beginning to be aware that this was so because of the cabbages and
the peaches. He told himself that though he had not hankered after
these flesh-pots, that though he would have preferred to be without
the flesh-pots, he had submitted to them. He was painfully conscious
of the guile of this young man, who had, as it were, cheated him out
of that appropriate acerbity of religion, without which a proselyting
sect can hardly maintain its ground beneath the shadow of an endowed
and domineering Church. War was necessary to Mr. Puddleham. He had
come to be hardly anybody at all, because he was at peace with the
vicar of the parish in which he was established. His eyes had been
becoming gradually open to all this for years; and when he had been
present at the bitter quarrel between the Vicar and the Marquis,
he had at once told himself that now was his opportunity. He had
intended to express a clear opinion to Mr. Fenwick that he, Mr.
Fenwick, had been very wrong in speaking to the Marquis as he had
spoken, and as he was walking out of the farm-house he was preparing
some words as to the respect due to those in authority. It happened,
however, that at that moment the wind was taken out of his sails by
a strange comparison which the Vicar made to him between the sins
of them two, ministers of God as they were, and the sins of Carry
Brattle. Mr. Puddleham at the moment had been cowed and quelled. He
was not quite able to carry himself in the Vicar's presence as though
he were the Vicar's equal. But the desire for a quarrel remained,
and when it was suggested to him by Mr. Packer, the Marquis's man of
business, that the green opposite to the Vicarage gate would be a
convenient site for his chapel, and that the Marquis was ready to
double his before-proffered subscription, then he saw plainly that
the moment had come, and that it was fitting that he