der your auspices, I hope they will become a
church-going and a church-loving people! Make them churchmen--you
understand me? Make them churchmen!'... Heaven help me! They needed first
to be made honest and temperate--to be humanized and Christianized!
'Church-loving and church-going!' The chaplaincy of Newgate is not,
perhaps, a sinecure; that of the Model Prison at Pentonville has,
probably, its hours of toil; and that attached to Horsemonger Lane is not
entirely a bed of roses; but if you wish to wear a man's heart and soul
out; to depress his spirits and prostrate his energies--if you would make
him long to exchange his lot with the day-laborer who whistles at the
plow,--station him as a curate, far apart from his fellows, in a village
made up of prize-fighters, smugglers, and wreckers!" To my lonely cure,
with a heavy heart, I went; and by a most reckless and rebellious crew I
speedily found myself surrounded--a crew which defied control.
Intoxicating liquors of all kinds abounded. The meanest hovel smelt of
spirits. Nor was there any want of contraband tobacco. Foreign luxuries,
in a word, were rife among them. And yet they were always in want--always
craving from their clergyman temporal aid--in his spiritual capacity they
were slow to trouble him; had ever on their lips the entreaty
'give'--'give;' and always protested that they 'were come to their
furthest, and had not a shilling in the world to help themselves withal.'

"For recklessness, drunkenness, and midnight brawls, all England could
not match that parish.

"To the general and prevailing aspect of poverty, there was one, and that
a marked exception. It presented itself in the person of Abigail
Lassiter--a widow--who was reputed to be wealthy, and with whose means,
unscrupulously acquired, a tale of murder was strangely blended.
Abigail's husband had been a smuggler, and she herself was a daring and
keen-eyed wrecker. For a season both throve. He had escaped detection in
many a heavy run of contraband goods; and she had come in for many a
valuable 'waif and stray' which the receding waters left upon the slimy
strand. It was, however, her last venture, which, in her neighbors'
language, _had made her_. Made her, indeed, independent of her fellows,
but a murderer before her God!... About day-break in a thick misty
morning in April, a vessel, heavily laden, was seen to ground on 'The
Jibber Sand;' and after striking heavily for some hours, suddenly to part