ce of their
houses, were men of genuine artistic gifts and accomplishment, and as
the development of one faculty tends on the whole to set others working,
when Robert, after a few weeks' work in the place, set up a popular
historical lecture once a fortnight, announcing the fact by a blue and
white poster in the school-room windows, it was the potters who provided
him with his first hearers.

The rest of the parish was divided between a population of dock
laborers, settled there to supply the needs of the great dock which ran
up into the south-eastern corner of it, two or three huge breweries, and
a colony of watchmakers, an offshoot of Clerkenwell, who lived together
in two or three streets, and showed the same peculiarities of race and
specialized training to be noticed in the more northerly settlement from
which they had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these
well-defined trades there was, of course, a warehouse population, and a
mass of heterogeneous cadging and catering which went on chiefly in the
river-side streets at the other side of the parish from Elgood Street,
in the neighborhood of St. Wilfrid's.

St. Wilfrid's at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a very
successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. From them at one
end of the scale, and from the innumerable clerks and superintendents
who during the daytime crowded the vast warehouses, of which the
district was full, its Lenten congregations, now in full activity, were
chiefly drawn.

The Protestant opposition, which had shown itself so brutally and
persistently in old days, was now, so far as outward manifestations
went, all but extinct. The cassocked monk-like clergy might preach and
'process' in the open air as much as they pleased. The populace, where
it was not indifferent, was friendly, and devoted living had borne its
natural fruits.

A small incident, which need not be recorded, recalled to Elsmere's
mind--after he had been working some six weeks in the district--the
forgotten unwelcome fact that St. Wilfrid's was the very church where
Newcome, first as senior curate and then as vicar, had spent those ten
wonderful years into which Elsmere at Murewell had been never tired of
inquiring. The thought of Newcome was a very sore thought. Elsmere had
written to him announcing his resignation of his living immediately
after his interview with the Bishop. The letter had remained unanswered,
and it was by now tolerably