aughed, Reay's hearty tones ringing above the rest.

"Oh, I should know what to do with them!"--he said; "but I wouldn't
spend them on my own selfish pleasures--that I swear! For one thing, I'd
run a daily newspaper on _honest_ lines----"

"It wouldn't sell!" observed Helmsley, drily.

"It would--it _should_!" declared Reay--"And I'd tell the people the
truth of things,--I'd expose every financial fraud I could find----"

"And you'd live in the law-courts, I fear!" said Mr. Bunce, gravely
shaking his head--"We may be perfectly certain, I think--may we not,
David?--that the law-courts would be Mr. Reay's permanent address?"

They laughed again, and the conversation turned to other topics, though
its tenor was not forgotten by anyone, least of all by Helmsley, who sat
very silent for a long time afterwards, thinking deeply, and seeing in
his thoughts various channels of usefulness to the world and the world's
progress, which he had missed, but which others after him would find.

Meanwhile Weircombe suffered a kind of moral convulsion in the advent of
the Reverend Mr. Arbroath, who arrived to "take duty" in the absence of
its legitimate pastor. He descended upon the tiny place like an embodied
black whirlwind, bringing his wife with him, a lady whose facial
lineaments bore the strangest and most remarkable resemblance to those
of a china cat; not a natural cat, because there is something soft and
appealing about a real "pussy,"--whereas Mrs. Arbroath's countenance was
cold and hard and shiny, like porcelain, and her smile was precisely
that of the immovable and ruthless-looking animal designed long ago by
old-time potters and named "Cheshire." Her eyes were similar to the eyes
of that malevolent china creature--and when she spoke, her voice had the
shrill tone which was but a few notes off the actual "_me-iau_" of an
angry "Tom." Within a few days after their arrival, every cottage in the
"coombe" had been "visited," and both Mr. and Mrs. Arbroath had made up
their minds as to the neglected, wholly unspiritual and unregenerate
nature of the little flock whom they had offered, for sake of their own
health and advantage, to tend. The villagers had received them civilly,
but without enthusiasm. When tackled on the subject of their religious
opinions, most of them declined to answer, except Mr. Twitt, who, fixing
a filmy eye sternly on the plain and gloomy face of Mr. Arbroath, said
emphatically:

"We aint no 'Igh Jinks!