states had prospered. The bedesmen
received one shilling and fourpence a day and a comfortable lodging. The
stipend of the precentor was L80 a year. The income arising from the
wardenship of the hospital was L800, besides the value of the house.

Murmurs had been heard in Barchester--few indeed and far between--that
the proceeds of John Hiram's property had not been fairly divided; the
thing had been whispered, and Mr. Harding had heard it. And Mr. Harding,
being an open-handed, just-minded man, had, on his instalment, declared
his intention of adding twopence a day to each man's pittance.

Mr. Harding was a small man, now verging on sixty years. His warmest
admirers could not say that he had ever been an industrious man; the
circumstances of his life had not called on him to so; and yet he could
hardly be called an idler. He had greatly improved the choir of
Barchester, and taken something more than his fair share in the
cathedral services. He was generous to all, but especially to the twelve
old men who were under his care. With an income of L800 a year and only
one daughter, Mr. Harding should have been above the world, but he was
not above Archdeacon Grantly, and was always more or less in debt to his
son-in-law, who had to a certain extent assumed the management of the
precentor's pecuniary affairs.

Mr. Harding had been precentor of Barchester for ten years when the
murmurs respecting the proceeds of Hiram's estate again became audible.
He was aware that two of his old men had been heard to say that if
everyone had his own, they might each have their hundred pounds a year,
and live like gentlemen, instead of a beggarly one shilling and sixpence
a day. One of this discontented pair, Abel Handy, had been put into the
hospital by Mr. Harding himself; he had been a stonemason in Barchester,
and had broken his thigh by a fall from a scaffolding. (Dr. Grantly had
been very anxious to put into it instead an insufferable clerk of his at
Plumstead, who had lost all his teeth, and whom the archdeacon hardly
knew how to get rid of by other means.) There was living at Barchester a
young man, a surgeon, named John Bold, and both Mr. Harding and Dr.
Grantly were well aware that to him was owing the pestilent rebellious
feeling which had shown itself in the hospital; and the renewal, too, of
that disagreeable talk about Hiram's estates which was again prevalent
in Barchester. Nevertheless, Mr. Harding and Mr. Bold were acquain