ng but the merest disciple of a
disciple of a disciple, and fervid in words of which he perceived scarce
a glimmer of the divine purport. At the same time, he might have seen
points of resemblance between his own early history and that of the
callow chirper of divinity now holding forth from his pulpit, which
might have tended to mollify his judgment with sympathy.

His people had behaved ill to him, and he could not say he was free from
resentment or pride, but he did make for them what excuse lay in the
fact that the congregation had been dwindling ever since the curate at
the abbey-church began to speak in such a strange outspoken fashion.
There now was a right sort of man! he said to himself. No attempted
oratory with him! no prepared surprises! no playhouse tricks! no studied
graces in wafture of hands and upheaved eyes! And yet at moments when he
became possessed with his object rather than subject, every inch of him
seemed alive. He was odd--very odd; perhaps he was crazy--but at least
he was honest. He had heard him himself, and judged him well worth
helping to what was better, for, alas! notwithstanding the vigor of his
preaching, he did not appear to have himself discovered as yet the
treasure hid in the field. He was, nevertheless, incomparably the
superior of the young man whom, expecting him to _draw_, the deacons of
his church, with the members behind them, had substituted for himself,
who had for more than fifteen years ministered to them the bread of
life.

Bread!--Yes, I think it might honestly be called bread that Walter Drake
had ministered. It had not been free from chalk or potatoes: bits of
shell and peel might have been found in it, with an occasional bit of
dirt, and a hair or two; yes, even a little alum, and that is _bad_,
because it tends to destroy, not satisfy the hunger. There was sawdust
in it, and parchment-dust, and lumber-dust; it was ill salted, badly
baked, sad; sometimes it was blue-moldy, and sometimes even maggoty; but
the mass of it was honest flour, and those who did not recoil from the
look of it, or recognize the presence of the variety of foreign matter,
could live upon it, in a sense, up to a certain pitch of life. But a
great deal of it was not of his baking at all--he had been merely the
distributor--crumbling down other bakers' loaves and making them up
again in his own shapes. In his declining years, however, he had been
really beginning to learn the business. Only, in h