heir faces which made me feel certain they had been singing; not
doubtless with the old glory of the violoncello, the clarinet and the
trombone, but still songs of Sion and no new fangled papistry.

CHAPTER XV

The hymn had engaged my attention; when it was over I had time to take
stock of the congregation. They were chiefly farmers--fat, very well-to-
do folk, who had come some of them with their wives and children from
outlying farms two and three miles away; haters of popery and of anything
which any one might choose to say was popish; good, sensible fellows who
detested theory of any kind, whose ideal was the maintenance of the
_status quo_ with perhaps a loving reminiscence of old war times, and a
sense of wrong that the weather was not more completely under their
control, who desired higher prices and cheaper wages, but otherwise were
most contented when things were changing least; tolerators, if not
lovers, of all that was familiar, haters of all that was unfamiliar; they
would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion
doubted, and at seeing it practised.

"What can there be in common between Theobald and his parishioners?" said
Christina to me, in the course of the evening, when her husband was for a
few moments absent. "Of course one must not complain, but I assure you
it grieves me to see a man of Theobald's ability thrown away upon such a
place as this. If we had only been at Gaysbury, where there are the A's,
the B's, the C's, and Lord D's place, as you know, quite close, I should
not then have felt that we were living in such a desert; but I suppose it
is for the best," she added more cheerfully; "and then of course the
Bishop will come to us whenever he is in the neighbourhood, and if we
were at Gaysbury he might have gone to Lord D's."

Perhaps I have now said enough to indicate the kind of place in which
Theobald's lines were cast, and the sort of woman he had married. As for
his own habits, I see him trudging through muddy lanes and over long
sweeps of plover-haunted pastures to visit a dying cottager's wife. He
takes her meat and wine from his own table, and that not a little only
but liberally. According to his lights also, he administers what he is
pleased to call spiritual consolation.

"I am afraid I'm going to Hell, Sir," says the sick woman with a whine.
"Oh, Sir, save me, save me, don't let me go there. I couldn't stand it,
Sir, I should die with fear, the