s would taste sweetest to me that were served with Latin
sauce. They are both severely pious, and are for ever engaged in
desperate efforts to practise what they preach; than which, as we all
know, nothing is more difficult. He works in his parish with the most
noble self-devotion, and never loses courage, although his efforts
have been several times rewarded by disgusting libels pasted up on the
street-corners, thrown under doors, and even fastened to his own garden
wall. The peasant hereabouts is past belief low and animal, and a
sensitive, intellectual parson among them is really a pearl before
swine. For years he has gone on unflinchingly, filled with the most
living faith and hope and charity, and I sometimes wonder whether they
are any better now in his parish than they were under his predecessor,
a man who smoked and drank beer from Monday morning to Saturday night,
never did a stroke of work, and often kept the scanty congregation
waiting on Sunday afternoons while he finished his postprandial nap. It
is discouraging enough to make most men give in, and leave the parish to
get to heaven or not as it pleases; but he never seems discouraged, and
goes on sacrificing the best part of his life to these people when all
his tastes are literary, and all his inclinations towards the life of
the student. His convictions drag him out of his little home at all
hours to minister to the sick and exhort the wicked; they give him no
rest, and never let him feel he has done enough; and when he comes
home weary, after a day's wrestling with his parishioners' souls, he is
confronted on his doorstep by filthy abuse pasted up on his own front
door. He never speaks of these things, but how shall they be hid?
Everybody here knows everything that happens before the day is over, and
what we have for dinner is of far greater general interest than the most
astounding political earthquake. They have a pretty, roomy cottage, and
a good bit of ground adjoining the churchyard. His predecessor used to
hang out his washing on the tombstones to dry, but then he was a person
entirely lost to all sense of decency, and had finally to be removed,
preaching a farewell sermon of a most vituperative description, and
hurling invective at the Man of Wrath, who sat up in his box drinking
in every word and enjoying himself thoroughly. The Man of Wrath likes
novelty, and such a sermon had never been heard before. It is spoken of
in the village to this day wit