hard features were revealed all agrin and ashine with glee. Yet a
drizzling night, a somewhat perilous expedition, you would think were
not circumstances calculated to enliven those exposed to the wet and
engaged in the adventure. If any member or members of the crew who had
been at work on Stilbro' Moor had caught a view of this party, they
would have had great pleasure in shooting either of the leaders from
behind a wall: and the leaders knew this; and the fact is, being both
men of steely nerves and steady-beating hearts, were elate with the
knowledge.

I am aware, reader, and you need not remind me, that it is a dreadful
thing for a person to be warlike; I am aware that he should be a man of
peace. I have some faint outline of an idea of what a clergyman's
mission is amongst mankind, and I remember distinctly whose servant he
is, whose message he delivers, whose example he should follow; yet, with
all this, if you are a parson-hater, you need not expect me to go along
with you every step of your dismal, downward-tending, unchristian road;
you need not expect me to join in your deep anathemas, at once so narrow
and so sweeping, in your poisonous rancour, so intense and so absurd,
against "the cloth;" to lift up my eyes and hands with a Supplehough,
or to inflate my lungs with a Barraclough, in horror and denunciation of
the diabolical rector of Briarfield.

He was not diabolical at all. The evil simply was--he had missed his
vocation. He should have been a soldier, and circumstances had made him
a priest. For the rest, he was a conscientious, hard-headed,
hard-handed, brave, stern, implacable, faithful little man; a man almost
without sympathy, ungentle, prejudiced, and rigid, but a man true to
principle, honourable, sagacious, and sincere. It seems to me, reader,
that you cannot always cut out men to fit their profession, and that you
ought not to curse them because their profession sometimes hangs on them
ungracefully. Nor will I curse Helstone, clerical Cossack as he was. Yet
he _was_ cursed, and by many of his own parishioners, as by others he
was adored--which is the frequent fate of men who show partiality in
friendship and bitterness in enmity, who are equally attached to
principles and adherent to prejudices.

Helstone and Moore being both in excellent spirits, and united for the
present in one cause, you would expect that, as they rode side by side,
they would converse amicably. Oh no! These two men, of ha