s reward. No
silver teapots or salvers, with flowery inscriptions, setting forth his
virtues and the appreciation of a genteel parish; no fat living or
stall, for which he never looked, and didn't care; no sighs and praises
of comfortable dowagers and well got-up young women, who worked him
slippers, sugared his tea, and adored him as 'a devoted man;' but a
manly respect, wrung from the unwilling souls of men who fancied his
order their natural enemies; the fear and hatred of every one who was
false or unjust in the district, were he master or man; and the blessed
sight of women and children daily becoming more human and more homely, a
comfort to themselves and to their husbands and fathers.

These things of course took time, and had to be fought for with toil and
sweat of brain and heart, and with the life-blood poured out. All that,
Arthur had laid his account to give, and took as a matter of course;
neither pitying himself, or looking on himself as a martyr, when he felt
the wear and tear making him feel old before his time, and the stifling
air of fever dens telling on his health. His wife seconded him in
everything. She had been rather fond of society, and much admired and
run after before her marriage; and the London world, to which she had
belonged, pitied poor Fanny Evelyn when she married the young clergyman
and went to settle in that smoky hole Turley, a very nest of Chartism
and Atheism, in a part of the county which all the decent families had
had to leave for years. However, somehow or other she didn't seem to
care. If her husband's living had been amongst green fields and near
pleasant neighbours, she would have liked it better, that she never
pretended to deny. But there they were: the air wasn't bad after all;
the people were very good sort of people, civil to you if you were civil
to them, after the first brush; and they didn't expect to work miracles,
and convert them all off-hand into model Christians. So he and she went
quietly among the folk, talking to and treating them just as they would
have done people of their own rank. They didn't feel that they were
doing anything out of the common way, and so were perfectly natural, and
had none of that condescension or consciousness of manner which so
outrages the independent poor. And thus they gradually won respect and
confidence; and after sixteen years he was looked up to by the whole
neighborhood as _the_ just man, _the_ man to whom masters and men coul