My friends from Babylon the great are very good to me in the summer-time. They come in a delightful stream from their thousand luxuries, their great social gatherings, their brilliant talk, and their cheering and stimulating surroundings; they come from all the excitement and the whirl of London or some other huge city where men live, and they make their friendly sojourn with us here in the wilderness even for a week at a time. They come in a generous and self-denying spirit to console and condole with the man whom they pity so gracefully—the poor country parson “relegated,” as Bishop Stubbs is pleased to express it, “to the comparative uselessness of literary (and clerical) retirement.” I observe that the first question my good friends ask is invariably this: “What shall we do and where shall we go—to-morrow?” It would be absurd to suppose that any man in his senses comes to the wilderness to stay there, or that there could be anything to do there. A man goes to a place to see, not the place itself, but some other place. When you find yourself in the wilderness you may use any spot in it as a point of departure, but as a dwelling-place, a resting-place, never!

Moreover, I observe that, by the help of such means of locomotion as we have at command, the days pass merrily enough with my visitors in fine weather. But as sure as ever the rain comes, so surely do my friends receive important letters calling them back, much to their distress and disappointment. If the weather be very bad—obstinately bad—or if a horse falls lame and cannot be replaced, or some equally crushing disaster keeps us all confined to the house and garden, my visitors invariably receive a telegram which summons them home instantly even at the cost of having to send for a fly to the nearest market town. Sometimes, by a rare coincidence, a kindly being drops in upon us even in the winter. He is always genial, cordial, and a great refreshment, but he never stays a second night. We keep him warm, we allow a liberal use of “the shameful,” we give him meat and drink of the best, we flatter him, we coddle him, we talk and draw him out, we “show him things,” but he never stays over that single night; and when he goes, as he shakes our hands and wraps himself up in his rugs and furs, I notice that he has a sort of conflate expression upon his countenance; his face is as a hybrid flower where two beauties blend. One eye says plainly, “I am a lucky dog, for I am going away at last,” and the other eye, beaming with kindliness, sometimes with affection, says just as plainly, “Poor old boy, how I do pity you!”

Well! this is a pitiful age; that is, it is an age very full of pity. The ingenuity shown by some good people in finding out new objects of commiseration is truly admirable. It is hardly to be expected that the country parson should escape the general appetite for shedding tears over real or supposed sufferers.

But it strikes some of us poor forlorn ones as not a little curious that our grand town friends never by any chance seem to see what there is in our lot that is really pathetic or trying. “How often do you give it meat?” said a blushing, mild-eyed, lank-haired young worthy in my hearing the other day. “Lawk! sir, that don’t have no meat,” answered the laughing mother, as she hugged her tiny baby closer to her bosom. “Never have meat? How dreadful!” Just so! But it is not only ludicrous, it is annoying, to be pitied for the wrong thing; and though I am not inclined to maintain the thesis that we, the soldiers of God’s army of occupation, who are doing outpost duty, pass our lives in a whirl of tumultuous and delicious joy, yet, if I am to be pitied, do let me be pitied intelligently. I cannot expect to be envied, but surely it is not such a very heavy calamity for a man never to catch a sight of Truth or The World, or to find that there is not such a thing as an oyster-knife in his parish.

Moreover, side by side with pity, there is a large amount of much more irritating and ignorant exaggeration of the good things we are supposed to enjoy. We do not, I admit, hear quite so often as formerly about “fat livings” and “valuable preferment,” nor about the “rectorial mansion with a thousand a year”; but we hear a great deal more about such fabulous lands of Goshen than we ought to hear. There is always a disposition to represent our neighbours as better off than ourselves, and whereas the salaried townsman knows that his income, whatever it may be, is his net income which he may count upon as his spending fund to use as he pleases, when he hears of others as receiving or entitled to receive so many pounds a year, he assumes that they do receive it and that they may spend it as they please. The townsman, again, who moves among the multitude and every hour is reminded of that multitude pressing, as all fluids do, “equally in all directions,” hears, and sometimes he knows, that the clergy in the towns have immense claims upon their time and are always on the move in the streets and courts. They are always about, always en évidence. If a man has only to minister to a paltry seven hundred, what can he have to do? He must be a drone.

Moreover, the aforesaid townsman has read all about those country parsons. You can hardly take up a novel without finding a sleek rector figuring in the volumes. These idealized rural clerics always remind me of Mr. Whistler’s Nocturnes. The figures roll at you through the mists that are gathering round them. The good people who try to introduce us to these reverend characters very rarely venture upon a firm and distinct outline. The truth is, that for the most part the novelists never slept in a country parsonage in their lives, never knew a country parson out of a book.

A year or two ago my friend X. was dining in a London mansion. “Who’s that?” said a lady opposite, as she ducked her head in his direction and looked at her partner. X. turned to speak to his partner, but could not help hearing the scarcely whispered dialogue: “A country parson, did you say? Why, he’s tall!”

It was quite a surprise to that lady novelist that a country parson could be tall! Many men are tall—policemen, for instance. But only short men ought to be country parsons. Why! we shall hear of one of them being good-looking next!

When any class of men feel themselves to be the butt of others, they are apt to be a little cowed. They hold their peace and fret, and if they resent their hard treatment and speak out, they rarely do themselves justice. Very few men can come well out of a snub, and the countryman who is not used to it never knows what to reply to offensive language. Yet worms have been known to turn, not that I ever heard they got any good by it; they can’t bite, and they can’t sting, but I suppose it comforts them to deliver their own souls. Poor worms! Yes! you may pity them.

But if the country parson has his trials, how may he hope to be listened to when he desires to make it clear what they are? Where shall he begin? Where shall he begin if not by pointing to that delicate nerve-centre of draped humanity, exquisite in its sensitiveness, knowing no rest in its perpetual giving out of force, for ever hungering for renewal of its exhausted resources, feeling no pain in its plethora and dreading no death save from inanition—to wit, the Pocket? Touch a man’s pocket, and a shudder thrills through every fibre.

The country parson has a great deal to complain of at the hands of those who will persist in talking of him as an exceptionally thriving stipendiary. It is one thing to say that in all cases he gets more than he deserves; it is quite another to put forth unblushingly that his income is half as much again as in fact it is, and his outgoings only what the outgoings of other men are. Logicians class the suppressio veri among sophisms; but would it not be better to call that artful proceeding a fraud? “Drink fair, Betsy, whatever you do!” said Mrs. Gamp on a memorable occasion. Yes, if it is only out of the teapot.

i. With regard to the income of the country parson, it may be laid down as a fact not to be disputed, that hardly one per cent. of the country clergy ever touch the full amount which theoretically they are entitled to receive. In the case of parishes where the land is much subdivided, and where there are a number of small tithepayers, it would be almost impossible for the clergyman personally to collect his dues; he almost invariably employs an agent, who is not a likely man to do his work for love. Even the agent can rarely get in all the small sums that the small folk ought to pay. Even he has to submit to occasional defalcations, and to consider whether it is worth while to press the legal rights of his employer too far. Moreover, the small folk from time immemorial have expected something in the shape of a tithe dinner or a tithe tea, for which the diners or the tea-drinkers do not pay, you may be sure; this constitutes a not inconsiderable abatement on the sum-total of receipts which ought to come to hand at the tithe audit.

Taking one year with another, it may be accepted as a moderate estimate that the cost of collecting his tithe, plus bad debts in some shape or other, amounts to six per cent., and he who gets within seven per cent. of his clerical income gets more than most of us do. But the law allows of no abatement in respect of this initial charge; and because the law takes up this ground, the world at large assumes that the nominal gross income of the benefice does come into the pockets of the incumbent. The world at large is quite certain that nobody in his senses makes a return of a larger income than he enjoys, and if the parson pays on £500, people assume that he does not get less from his living than that. The world at large does not know that the parson is not asked to make a return. The surveyor makes up his books on the tithe commutation table for the parish, and on that the parson is assessed, whatever he may say.

ii. For be it known it is with the surveyor or rate-collector that the parson’s first and most important concern lies. Whatever he may receive from his cure, however numerous may be the defaulters among the tithe-payers, however large the expense of collecting his dues, the parson has to pay rates on his gross income. The barrister and the physician, the artist or the head of a government department, knows or need know nothing about rates. He may live in a garret if he likes; he may live in a boarding-house at so much a week; he may live in a flat at a rent which covers all extraneous charges. I suppose we most of us have known men of considerable fortune, men who live in chambers, men who live in lodgings, men who live in college rooms, who never directly paid a rate in their lives. Our lamented H., who dropped out recently, leaving £97,000 behind him, invested in first-class securities, was one of these languidly prosperous men. “I do detetht violent language on any thubject whatever,” he lisped out to me once. “I hope I thall never thee that man again who thtormed at rate collectorth tho. What ith a rate collector? Doth he wear a uniform?”

But a country parson and all that he has in the world, qua country parson, is rateable to his very last farthing, and beyond it: the fiction being that he is a landed proprietor, and as such in the enjoyment of an income from real property. It is in vain that he pleads that his nominal income is of all property the most unreal:—he is told that he has a claim upon the land, and the land cannot run away. It is in vain that he plaintively protests that he would gladly live in a smaller house if he were allowed—he does live in it, chained to it like a dangerous dog to his kennel. It is in vain that he urges that he cannot let his glebe, and may not cut down the trees upon it—that he is compelled to keep his house in tenantable repair, and maintain the fences as he found them. The impassive functionary expresses a well-feigned regret and some guarded commiseration; but he has his duty to perform, and the rates have to be paid—Poor rates, County rates, School Board rates, and all the rest of them; and paid upon that parson’s gross income—such an income as never comes, and which everybody knows never could be collected.

You may say in your graceful way that a parson does not pay a bit more than he ought to pay, and that he may be thankful if he be allowed to live at all. That may be quite true—I don’t think it is, but it may be—but there are some things that are not true, and one of them is, that the gross income awarded to the country parson on paper gives anything approaching to a fair notion of the amount of income that comes to his hands. And if you are going to pity the country parson, do begin at the right end, and consider how you would like to pay such rates as he pays on your gross income.

iii. But when the country parson’s rates have been duly paid, the next thing that he is answerable for is the Land-tax. The mysteries of the Land-tax are quite beyond me. If I could afford to give up three years of my life to the uninterrupted study of the history and incidence of the Land-tax, I think, by what people tell me, I might get to know something about it, and be in a position to enlighten mankind upon this abstruse subject; but as I really have not three years of my life to spare, I must needs acquiesce in my hopeless ignorance even to the end. Only this I do know, that, whereas the country parson is called upon to pay sixpence in the pound for Income-tax, he is called upon to pay nearly ninepence in the pound for Land-tax: at any rate, I know one country parson who has to do so.

Let the Land-tax pass—it is beyond me. But how about the Income-tax? As I have said above, in the case of all other professions except the clerical, a man makes his return of income upon the available income which comes to him after deducting all fair and reasonable office expenses. But for the crime of clericalism, the country parson is debarred from making any such deductions as are permitted to other human beings. Many of the “good livings” in East Anglia have two churches, each of which must be served. A man cannot be in two places at once; and the laws of nature and of the Church being in conflict, the laws of the Church carry it over the laws of nature, and the rector has to put in an appearance at his second church by deputy—in other words, the poor man has to keep a curate. If he were a country solicitor who was compelled to keep a clerk, he would deduct the salary of the clerk from the profits of his business; but being only a country parson, he can do nothing of the sort: he has to pay Income-tax all the same on his gross returns. A curate is a luxury, as a riding horse is a luxury; and the only wonder is that curates have not long ago been included among those superfluous animals chargeable to the assessed taxes.

iv. Perhaps the most irritating of all imposts that press upon the country parson is that to which he has to submit because the churchyard is technically part of his freehold. In many parts of the country a fee is charged for burying the dead. In the diocese of Norwich there are no burial fees. The right of burying his dead in the churchyard is a right which may be claimed by any inhabitant of the parish; the soil of the churchyard is said to belong to the parishioners; the surface of the soil belongs to the parson. This being so, the parson is assessed in the books of the parish for the assumed value of the herbage growing upon the soil, and on this assumed value he is accordingly compelled to pay rates, Income-tax, and Land-tax. Of course the parson could legally turn cattle or donkeys into the churchyard to disport themselves among the graves; but happily that man who should venture to do this nowadays would be thought guilty of an outrage upon all decency. Who of us is there who does not rejoice that this state of feeling has grown up among us? But the result is that the churchyard, so far from being a source of income to the parson, has become a source of expense to him in almost all cases. Somebody has to keep the grass mown, and see that God’s acre is not desecrated. Few of us grumble at that; and some who have large resources pride themselves on keeping their churchyards as a lawn is kept or a garden. But it surely is monstrous when everybody knows that the churchyard, so far from bringing the parson any pecuniary benefit, entails an annual expense upon him which is practically unavoidable—it is monstrous, I say, that the parson should be assessed upon the value of the crop which might be raised off dead men’s graves, and that he should be taxed for showing an example of decency and right feeling to those around him.

“Well! But why don’t you appeal?”

My excellent sir, do you suppose that nobody ever has appealed? Do you suppose that very original idea of yours has never occurred to any one else before? Or do you suppose that we the shepherds of Arcady, find appealing against an assessment, made by our neighbours to relieve themselves, before the magistrates at Quarter Sessions, is a process peculiarly pleasurable and particularly profitable when the costs are defrayed? We grumble or fret, we count it among our trials, but we say, “After all, it is only about five shillings a-year. Anything for a quiet life. Let it go!” So the wrong gets to be established as a right. But it is none the less a wrong because it continues to exist, or because in coin of the realm it amounts to a trifle. Was it Mr. Midshipman Easy’s nurse who urged in excuse of her moral turpitude in having an infant of her very own, “Please, ma’am, it was such a little one?”

The grievance of having to pay rates on the churchyard may be in one sense a little one. But when it comes to being charged rates upon the premiums you pay upon your insurance policies, some of them—the insurance of his church and other buildings—being compulsory payments, and upon the mortgage of your benefice effected in your predecessor’s time—even the sneerer at a sentimental grievance could hardly call such charges as these not worth making a fuss about. In many a needy country parson’s household the rates make all the difference whether his children can have butter to their bread or not.

It must be obvious to most people from what has been already said—and much more might be said—that, unless a country parson have some resources outside of any income derivable from his benefice, he must needs be a very poor man. Our people know this better than any one else, and it is often a very anxious question on the appointment of a new incumbent whether he will live in the same style as that which his predecessor maintained. Will he keep a carriage, or only a pony chaise? Will he employ two men in the garden? Will he “put out his washing?”2 Will his house be a small local market for poultry and butter and eggs? Will he farm the glebe or let it? How many servants will he keep, and will the lady want a girl to train in the kitchen or the nursery from time to time? Such questions as these are sometimes very anxious ones in a remote country village where every pound spent among the inhabitants serves to build up a margin outside the ordinary income of the wage-earners, and which helps the small occupiers to tide over many a temporary embarrassment when money is scarce, and small payments have to be met and cannot any longer be deferred.

Let me, before going any further, deal with a question which I have had suggested to me again and again by certain peculiar people with dearly beloved theories of their own. It is often asked, Ought clergymen ever to be rich men? Is not a rich clergyman out of place in a country parsonage? Does not his wealth raise him too far above the level of his people? Does it not make him sit loosely to his duties? Does not the fact of a country parson being known to be a rich man tend to demoralize a parish?

Lest it should be supposed that the present writer is one of the fortunate ones rolling in riches, and therefore in a manner bound to stand up for his own class—let it be at once understood that the present writer is a man of straw, one of those men to whom the month of January is a month of deep anxiety, perplexity, and depression of soul. Yet he would disdain to join the band of whining grumblers only because one year after another he finds that he must content himself with the corned beef and carrots, and cannot by hook or by crook afford to indulge in some very desirable recreation or expense which the majority of his acquaintance habitually regard as absolutely necessary if existence is to be endured at all. No! I am very far indeed from being a rich man; but this I am bound to testify in common fairness to my wealthier brethren in the ministry of the Church of England, that if any impartial person, with adequate knowledge of the facts, were asked to point out the most devoted, zealous, unworldly, and practically efficient country parsons in the diocese of Norwich—for let me speak as I do know—he would without hesitation name first and foremost some of the richest of the clergy in the eastern counties.

Do you desire that your son should begin his ministerial life under a man of great ability, sound sense, courage, and religious earnestness, a man who never spares himself and will not suffer his subordinates to sink into slovenly frivolity and idleness, then make your approaches to Lucullus, and you will have cause to thank God if the young fellow serves his apprenticeship under a guide and teacher such as this. He will learn no nonsense there, and see no masquerading, only an undemonstrative but unflinching adherence to the path believed to be the path of duty, and a manliness of self-surrender such as can only arouse an enthusiasm of respect and esteem.

Does “our own correspondent” wish to see how a score of infamous hovels can be changed into a score of model cottages which pay interest on the cost of their erection, and which in half a dozen years have helped perceptibly to raise the tone and tastes and habits of the population till it really looks as if some barbarians could be civilized by a coup de main?—let him pay a visit to the parish of our Reverend Hercules, only one of whose many labours it has been to cleanse an Augean stable. It will do him good to see the mighty shoulders of that rugged philanthropist, him of the broad brow and the great heart and the deep purse, always at work and always at home, about the very last man in England to be suspected of belonging to the sickly sort of puling visionaries.

Do you want to meet with a type of the saintly parish priest, one after holy George Herbert’s heart, one with hardly a thought that does not turn upon the service of the sanctuary or the duties that he owes to his scattered flock? Come with me, and we will go together and look at one of the most beautiful village churches in the land, on which our devout Ambrose has spent his thousands only with deep gratitude that he has been permitted to spend them so—and with never a word of brag or publicity, never a paragraph foisted into the newspapers. And as we pass out of that quiet churchyard, trim as a queen’s parterre, I will show you the window of that little study which Ambrose has not thought it right to enlarge, and if he be not there, be sure we shall find him at his school or by the sick-bed of the poor, or inquiring into some case of sorrow or sin where a kindly hand or a wise word may peradventure solace the sad or go some way to raise the fallen.

What country parson among all the nine hundred and odd within this unwieldy diocese has lived a simpler or more devoted life than our Nestor—[Greek: γέρων ἱππηλάτα Νέστωρ]—he who for more than threescore years and ten has gone in and out among his people, and doing his pastoral work so naturally, so much as a matter of course, that no one thinks of his being a rich man, except when those towering horses of his stop at our lowly portals and have to be corkscrewed into our diminutive stables?

And who knows not of thee, Euerges, treasurer and secretary and general mainstay of every good work, the idol of thy people and their healer, the terror of the impostor, and the true friend of all that deserve thy helping hand and purse! or thee, too, Amomos, who after thirty years of work as an evangelist in the city, spending there thyself and thy substance all the while, hast now betaken thee to the poor villagers, if haply some little good may yet be done among the lowly ones before the night cometh when no man can work?

“But do not such well-meaning gentlemen as these demoralize the poor?” Oh dear yes! of course they do. It is so very demoralizing to help a lame dog over a stile. It does so pauperize a broken-down couple to whom the Poor Law Guardians allow three shillings a week and half a stone of flour, if you give them a sack of potatoes about Christmas time. It corrupts and degrades Biddy Bundle to bestow an old petticoat upon her when she is shivering with the cold, and it takes all self-respect and independence from the unruly bosom of Dick the fiddler to offer him your old hat or a shabby pair of trousers. The truest, wisest, most far-sighted and most magnanimous charity is to let Harry Dobbs have “an order for the house” when he is out of work and short of coals—Harry Dobbs, who set himself against all the laws of political economy, and married at eighteen, when he had not the wherewithal to buy the chairs and tables. So we country parsons are a demoralizing force in the body politic forsooth, because we cannot bear to see poor people starve at our gates. We have been known actually to give soup to a reckless couple guilty of twelve children; actually soup! And we have dropped corrupting shillings into trembling hands, only because they were trembling, and distributed ounces of tobacco to the inmates of the Union, and poisoned the souls of old beldames with gratuitous half-pounds of tea. And we counsel people to come to church, when they would much rather go to the public-house, and we coddle them and warm them now and then, and instead of leaving them to learn manliness and independence and self-reliance on twelve shillings a week, we step between them and the consequences of their own improvidence, and we disturb the action of the beautiful laws of the universe, and where we see the ponderous wheels of Juggernaut just going to roll over a helpless imbecile who has tripped and dropped, we must needs make a clutch at him and pull him out by the scruff of the neck, and tell him to get up and not do it again. And all this is demoralizing and pauperizing, is it?

Out upon you! you miserable prigs with your chatter and babble! You to talk of the parson’s narrowness and his bigotry and his cant? You to sneer at him for being the slave of a superstition? You to pose as the only thinkers with all the logic of all the philosophers on your side, all the logic and never a crumb of common sense to back it? Bigotry and intolerance and cant and class jealousy and scorn—that refuge for the intellectually destitute and the blustering coward—where will you find them in all their most bitter and sour and hateful intensity, if not among the new lights, the self-styled economists? And we have to sit mum and let brainless pretenders superciliously put us out of court with a self-complacent wave of the hand, as they give utterance to perky platitudes about the clergy pauperizing the working man. No, Mr. Dandy Dryskull. No! this gospel of yours, a little trying to listen to, is being found out; ours will see the end of it.

I, for one, hereby proclaim and declare that I intend to help the sick and aged and struggling poor whenever I have the chance, and as far as I have the means, and I hope the day will never come when I shall cease to think without shame of him who is said to have made it his boast that he had never given a beggar a penny in his life. I am free to confess that I draw the line somewhere. I do draw the line at the tramp—I do find it necessary to be uncompromising there. Indeed I keep a big dog for the tramp, and that dog, inasmuch as he passes his happy life in a country parsonage—that dog, I say, is not muzzled.

“But don’t you get imposed upon? Don’t you get asked to replace dead horses and cows and pigs and donkeys, that never walked on four legs and no mortal eye ever saw in the land of the living?”

Of course we do! Is it a prerogative of the country parson to be duped by a swindler? Oh, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, were you never taken in? Never! Then, sir, I could not have you for a son-in-law! As for us—we country parsons—we do occasionally get imposed upon in very absurd and contemptible fashion. Sometimes we submit to be bled with our eyes open. A bungling bumpkin has managed to get his horse’s leg broken by his own stupidity. We know that the fellow was jiggling the poor brute’s teeth out of his mouth at the time, or the animal would never have shown himself as great an idiot as his master. But there stands the master horseless, with the tears in his eyes, and we know all about him and the hard struggle he has had to keep things going, and we say to ourselves, “I wonder what would happen to me if my horse dropped down dead some fine morning. Who would help me to another? and what then?” So we pull out the sovereign, and give the fellow a note to somebody else, and that is how we demoralize him.

Or another comes at night-time and wants to speak to us on very particular business, and implores us to tide him over a real difficulty, and.... “What? do you mean to say, you lend fellows money?” Yes. I mean to say I have even done that and very very rarely repented of it, and I mean to say there are men, and women too, to whom I would lend money again if I had it; but it does not follow that I would lend it to everybody, least of all that I would lend it to you, Mr. Worldly Wiseman. Try it on, sir! Try it on! and see whether you would depart triumphant from the interview!

Moreover, the country parson has always to pay a little—just a very little—more than any one else for most things that come to his door. The market has always risen when he wants to buy, and has always suddenly fallen when he wants to sell. The small man’s oats are invariably superior to any one’s when he has a small parcel to dispose of to the parson. As to the price of hay, when the parson has to buy it, that is truly startling. I never see half a rood of carrots growing in a labourer’s allotment, but I feel sure I shall have to buy those carrots before Christmas, and sorry as I am to observe how rarely any fruit trees are ever planted in a poor man’s garden, I reflect that perhaps it is just as well, for already the damsons and the apples that besiege the rectory are almost overwhelming. I never ask what becomes of them, but it is morally and physically impossible that they should be eaten under this roof. “But, my dear, you must buy Widow Coe’s damsons; nobody else will, you know!” This is what I am told is “considering the poor people”; that is our way of putting it. You, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, you call it demoralizing them.

Then, too, the country parson is expected to “encourage the local industries.” I wonder whether they make pillow-lace in Bedfordshire as they did once. If they do, and especially if the demand for it in the outer world has waned, the country parsons’ wives in that part of England must have a very trying time of it.

Once, when I was in the merry twenties, a dirty old hag with an evil report, but no worse than other people, except that she was an old slut, knocked at my back door and asked to see “The Lady Shepherd.” Mrs. Triplet was a Mormonite, at any rate her husband was; and it was credibly believed that Mrs. Triplet herself had been baptized by immersion in a horsepond in the dead of night, dressed as Godiva was dressed during her famous ride, and seated, not upon a palfrey, but upon a jackass. How Triplet could ever have been converted to a belief in polygamy with his experience of the married state, I am entirely unable to explain. But Mrs. Triplet came to our door and asked for “The Lady Shepherd.” It was a delicate piece of flattery. She must have thought over it a long time. Was not the parson the shepherd? a bad one it might be, a hireling, a blind leader of the blind, but still a shepherd. Then his wife must needs be a shepherdess—and she did not look like it—or a sheep—No! that wouldn’t do at all—or the shepherd’s lady—and shepherds don’t have ladies; or—happy thought!—the Lady Shepherd.

Accordingly Mrs. Triplet asked for the Lady Shepherd. Mrs. Triplet in former times had been a tailor’s hand, and in that capacity had made a few shillings a week by odd jobs for the Cambridge tailors in term time; but she had married, and now she lived too far away in the wilds to be able to continue at her old employment, and being a bad manager, she soon had to cast about for some new source of income. In the more comfortable cottages in the eastern counties you may often see laid out before the fire a mat of peculiar construction which sometimes looks like a small mattress in difficulties. It is made from selvages and clippings, the refuse of the tailor’s workshop; these strips of cloth are cut into lengths of two or three inches long by half an inch wide, and are knitted or tightly tied together with string, the variously coloured scraps being arranged in patterns according to the genius and taste of the artist. The complex structure when completed is stuffed with the clippings too small to be worked up on the outside, and the mass is then subjected to a process of thumping and stamping and pulling and hammering till at last there exudes—yes! that is the correct term, whatever you may say—a lumpy bundle, which in its pillowy and billowy entirety is called a hearthrug. The thing will last for generations, it never wears out, and it takes years of continuous stamping upon it before you can anyhow get it flat. It was one of these triumphs of industry that Mrs. Triplet desired to turn an honest penny by. Would her ladyship come and look at it in situ?

Now the lady shepherd is a woman of business, which the shepherd, notoriously, is not, and if she had gone alone no great harm would have come of the interview; but on that unlucky day the shepherd and his lady resolved to go together. That is a course which no shepherd and shepherdess should ever be persuaded to follow. Two men will often help one another when associated in a difficult enterprise; two women will almost always do better together than single-handed, but a man and a woman working together will always get in one another’s way. On the occasion referred to the quick-witted old crone saw her chance in a moment, and commenced to play off one of her visitors against the other with consummate skill. From a hole beneath the narrow stairs she dragged the massive structure, and slowly unfolding it before our eyes commenced to stamp upon it in a kind of hideous demon dance, gazing at it fondly from time to time as if she could hardly bear to part with it.

In those days the fashion of wearing gay clothing had only just gone out among the male sex. For, less than forty years ago, we used to appear, on state occasions, in blue dress coats and brass buttons, and at great gatherings you might see green coats and brown ones, mulberry coats and chocolate ones, and there was a certain iridescence that gave a peculiarly sprightly look to an assembly even of males in those days, which has all passed away now. Hence when Mrs. Triplet displayed her exhibit we found ourselves gazing at a very gaudy spectacle. “There, lady! And I made the pattern all myself, I did. Many’s the night I’ve laid awake thinking of it. Ah! them bottle-greens was hard to get, they was; gentlefolks has give up wearing greens. But that yaller rose, lady. Ain’t that a yaller rose?” For once in her life the lady shepherd lost her nerve. Spasms of hysterical laughter wrestled within her, and her flushed face and contorted frame betrayed the conflict that was raging. How would it end? in the rupture of a vein or in shrieks of uncontrollable merriment? The shepherd was in terror; he stooped to the foolishest flattery; he went as near lying as a shepherd could without literally lying; but comedy changed to tragedy when from his lean purse he desperately plucked his very last sovereign, and giving it to that guileful old sorceress, ordered her to bring that hearth-rug to the parsonage without delay.

Next week—the very next week—came a pressing offer from another parishioner of another of these articles of home manufacture; next month came a third, though the price had dropped fifty per cent., which was accepted with exultant thankfulness. There was positively no stopping the activity of the new industry; until, before three months were over, six of these fearful contrivances had been all but forced upon us, one of them travelling to our door in a donkey-cart and one in a wheel-barrow—the lady shepherd being told she might have them at her own price, and pay for them at her own convenience—only have them she must: the makers could by no means take them away.

“Well, but you had nobody but yourselves to thank. How could you be so weak and silly?”

That may be very true. But do not our trials—our smaller trials—become so just because we have only ourselves to thank for them? We in the wilderness are exposed to temptations which go some way to make us silly and soft-hearted. Somehow, few of us are certain to keep our hearts as hard as the nether millstone. I do not pretend to be one of the seven sages: what I do say is that we country parsons have our trials.

It is, however, when the country parson has to buy a horse that he finds himself tried to the uttermost. Day after day, from all points of the compass, there appear at his gate the cunningest of the cunning and the sharpest of the sharp; and if at the end of a week the parson has not arrived at the settled conviction that he is three parts of a fool, it is impossible for him to dispute that the whole fraternity of horsey men feel no manner of doubt that he is so. Now, I don’t like to be thought a fool: not many men do, unless they hope to gain something by it. The instinct of self-preservation or the hope of a kingdom might induce me to play the part of Brutus; but in my secret heart I should be buoyed up by the proud consciousness of superior wisdom. When, however, it comes to a long line of rogues—one after another for days and days without any collusion—continuing to tell you to your face, almost in so many words, that you certainly are a fool—it really ceases to be monotonous and becomes, after a while, vexatious. The fellows are so clever, too; they have such an enviable fluency of speech; they are possessed of such a rich fund of anecdote, such an easy play of fancy, such a readiness of apt illustration, and such a magnificent command of facial contortion, expressive of the subtlest movements of the heart and brain, that you cannot but feel how immeasurably inferior you are to the dullest of them in dialectic. But why should a man, when he asks you to try his charger, bring it round to the door-step, tempting you to get up on the off side?—what does he gain by it? Why should he tell you that “this hoss was a twin with that as Captain Dixie drives in his dog-cart”? Why should he assure you, upon his sacred honour, “that Roman nose will come square when the horse gets to be six years old—they always do”? or that “you always find bay horses turn chestnut if they’re clipped badly”?

These men would not try these fictions upon any one else; why should I suffer for being a country parson by being told a long story—with the most religious seriousness—of “that there horse as Mr. Abel had, that stopped growing in his fore-quarters when he was two and went on growing with his hind-quarters till he was seven—that hoss that they called Kangaroo, ’cause he’d jump anything—anything under a church tower, only you had to give him his head”? I used to get much more irritated by this kind of thing when I was less mellowed by age than I am: and I have learnt to be more tolerant even of a horse-dealer than I once was. In an outburst of indignation one day, I turned angrily upon one of the fraternity, and said to him, “Man! how can you go on lying in this way; why won’t you deal fairly, instead of always trying to take people in?” The man was not a bit offended—indeed he smiled quite kindly upon me. “Lor,’ sir, do you suppose we never get took in?” I am fully persuaded that horse-dealer thought I was going to try the confidence trick with him.

I am often assured by my town friends that the loneliness of my country life must be very trying. I reply with perfect truth that I have never known what it is to feel lonely except in London. Some years ago one Sunday afternoon I was compelled to consult an eminent oculist. When the cab drove up to the great man’s door in Cardross Square, his eminence was at the window in a brown study, with his elbows leaning on the wire blind, the tip of his nose flattened against the pane, his eyes vacantly staring at nothing. When we were shown into his presence, the forlorn and desolate expression on that forsaken man’s face was quite shocking to the nerves. A painter who could have reproduced the look of aimless and despairing woe might have made a name for ever. When people talk to me of loneliness I always instinctively recall the image of that famous oculist in the heart of London on a Sunday afternoon. Ever since that day I have never been able to get over a horror of wire blinds. Happily, they are articles of furniture which have almost gone out now, but they used to be fearfully common. Even now the Londoner thinks it de rigueur to darken the windows of his sitting-room on the ground floor; and in furnished lodgings you must have wire blinds. Why is this? When I ask the question I am told that you must have wire blinds: if you didn’t, people would look in. In the country we never have wire blinds, and yet nobody looks in; therefore you call our life lonely. But loneliness is not the simple product of external circumstances—it is the outcome of a morbid temperament, creating for itself a sense of vacuity, whatever may be a man’s surroundings.

I suppose we all know that wishy-washy stuff, so there is no need to go on with the quotation.

What is trying in the country parson’s life is its isolation. That is a very different thing from saying that he lives a lonely life. The parson who is conscientiously trying to do his duty in a country parish occupies a unique position. He is a man, and yet he must be something more than man, and something less too. He must be more than man in that he must be free from human passions and human weaknesses, or the whole neighbourhood is shocked by his frailty; he must be something less than man in his tastes and amusements and way of life, or there will be those who will be sure to denounce him as a worldling who ought never to have taken orders. If he be a man of birth and refinement, he is sure to be reported of as proud and haughty; if he be not quite a gentleman, he will be snubbed and flouted outrageously. The average country parson and his family has often to bear an amount of patronizing impertinence which is sometimes very trying. Even the squire and the parson do not always get on well together, and when they do not, the parson is very much at the other’s mercy, and may be thwarted and worried and humiliated almost to any extent by a powerful, ill-conditioned, and unscrupulous landed proprietor. But it is from the come-and-go people who hire the country houses which their owners are compelled to let, that we suffer most. Not that this is always the case, for it not unfrequently happens that the change in the occupancy of a country mansion is a clear gain socially, morally, and intellectually to a whole neighbourhood—when, in the place of a necessitous Squire Western, and his cubs of sons and his half-educated daughters, drearily impecunious, but not the less self-asserting and supercilious, we get a family of gentle manners and culture and accomplishments, and lo! it is as sunshine after rain. But sometimes the new comers are a grievous infliction. Town-bred folk who emerge from the back streets and have amassed money by a new hair-wash or an improvement in sticking-plaster. Such as these are out of harmony with their temporary surroundings: they giggle in the faces of the farmers’ daughters, ridicule the speech and manners of the labourers and their wives, and grumble at everything. They cannot think of walking in the dirty lanes, they are afraid of cows, and call children nasty little things. These people’s hospitalities are very trying.

“Come, my boy. Have a cut at the venison. Don’t be afraid. You shall have a good dinner for once; sha’n’t he, my dear? and as much champagne as you like to put inside you?” It was a bottle-nosed Sir Gorgious Midas who spoke, and his lady at the other end of the table gave me a kindly wink as she caught my eye. But the wine was Gilby’s, and not his best. These are the people who demoralize our country villages. They introduce a vulgarity of tone quite indescribable, and the rapidity of the change wrought in the sentiments and language of the rustics is sometimes quite wonderful.

The rustics don’t like these come-and-go folk, but they get dazzled by them notwithstanding; they resent the airs which the footmen and ladies’ maids give themselves, but nevertheless they envy them and think, “There’s my gal Polly—she’d be a lady if she was to get into sich a house as that!” When they hear that up at the hall they play tennis on Sunday afternoons, the old people are perplexed, and wonder what the world is coming to; the boys and girls begin to think that their jolly time is near, when they too shall submit to no restraint, and join the revel rout of scoffers. The sour puritan snarls out, “Ah! there’s your gentlefolks, they don’t want no religion, they don’t—and we don’t want no gentlefolks!” For your sour puritan somehow has always a lurking sympathy with the Socialist programme, and it’s honey and nuts to him to find out some new occasion for venting his spleen at the things that are. But one and all look askance at the parson, and inwardly chuckle that he is not having a pleasant time of it. “Our Reverend’s been took down a bit, since that young gent at the Hall lit his pipe in the church porch. ‘That ain’t seemly,’ says parson. ‘Dunno about that,’ says the tother, ‘but it seems nice.’” Chorus, half-giggle, half-sniggle.

Do not the scientists teach that no two atoms are in absolute contact with each other; that some interval separates every molecule from its next of kin? Certainly this is inherent in the office and function of the country parson, that he is not quite in touch with any one in his parish if he be a really earnest and conscientious parson. He is too good for the average happy-go-lucky fellow who wants to be let alone. There is nothing to gain by insulting him. “He’s that pig-headed he don’t seem to mind nothing—only swearing at him!” You cannot get him to take a side in a quarrel. He speaks out very unpleasant truths in public and private. He occupies a social position that is sometimes anomalous. He has a provoking knack of taking things by the right handle. He does not believe in the almighty dollar, as men of sense ought to believe; and he is usually in the right when it comes to a dispute in a vestry meeting because he is the only man in the parish that thinks of preparing himself for the discussion beforehand. This isolation extends not merely to matters social and intellectual; it is much more observable in the domain of sentiment. A rustic cannot at all understand what motive a man can possibly have for being a bookworm; he suspects a student of being engaged in some impious researches. “To hear that there Reverend of ours in the pulpit you might think we was all right. But, bless you! he ain’t same as other folk. He do keep a horoscope top o’ his house to look at the stares and sich.”

Not one man in a hundred of the labourers reads a book, and only when a book is new with a gaudy outside does he seem to value it even as a chattel. That any one should ever have any conceivable use for a big book is to him incomprehensible.

“If I might be so bold, sir,” said Jabez, an intelligent father of a family with some very bright children who are “won’erful for’ard in their larning,” “If I might be so bold, might I ask if you’ve really read all these grit books?” “No, Jabez; and I should be a bigger dunce than I am if I ever tried to. I keep them to use; they’re my tools, like your spade and hoe. What’s that thing called that I saw in your hand the other day when you were working at the draining job? You don’t often use that tool I think, do you?” “Well, no. But then we don’t get a job o’ draining now same as we used. I mean to say as a man may go ten years at a stretch and never lay a drain-tile.” “Well, then how about the use of his tools all this time?” Jabez smiled, slowly put his hand to his head, saw the point, and yet didn’t see it. “But, lawk sir! that’s somehow different. I can’t see what yow can du wi’ a grit book like this here.” It was a massive volume of Littré’s great dictionary, which I had just taken down to consult; it certainly did look portentous. “Why, Jabez, that’s a dictionary—a French dictionary. If I want to know all about a French word, you know, I look it up here. Sometimes I don’t find exactly what I want; then I go to that book, which is another French dictionary; and if....” I saw by the blank look in honest Jabez’ face that it was all in vain. “Want to know ... all about ... words.... Why you ain’t agoing to fix no drain-tiles with them sort o’ things. Now that du wholly pet me aywt, that du.”

I think no one who has not tried painfully to lift and lead others can have the least notion of the difficulty which the country parson has to contend with in the extreme thinness of the stratum in which the rural intellect moves. Since the schools have given more attention to geography, and since emigration has brought us now and then some entertaining letters from those who have emigrated to “furren parts,” the people have slowly learnt to think of a wider area of space than heretofore they could imagine. Though even now their notions of geography are almost as vague as their notions of astronomy; I have never seen a map in an agricultural labourer’s cottage. But their absolute ignorance of history amounts to an incapacity of conceiving the reality of anything that may have happened in past time. What their grandfathers have told them, that is to them history—everything before that is not so much as fable; it is not romance, it is a formless void, it is chaos. The worst of it is that they have no curiosity about the past. The same is true of their knowledge of anything approaching to the rudiments of physical science; it simply does not exist. A belief in the Ptolemaic system is universal in Arcady. I suspect that they think less about these things than they did. “That there old Gladstone, lawk! he’s a deep un he is! He’s as deep as the Pole Star he is!” said Solomon Bunch to me one day. “Pole Star?” I asked in surprise, “Where is the Pole Star, Sol?” “Lawks! I dunno; I’ve heard tell o’ the Pole Star as the deep un ever sin’ I was a booy!”

It is this narrowness in their range of ideas that makes it so hard for the townsman to become an effective speaker to the labourers. You could not make a greater mistake than by assuming you have only to use plain language to our rustics. So far from it, they love nothing better than sonorous words, the longer the better. It is when he attempts to make his audience follow a chain of reasoning that the orator fails most hopelessly, or when he comes to his illustrations. The poor people know so little, they read nothing, their experience is so confined, that one is very hard put to it to find a simile that is intelligible.

“Young David stood before the monarch’s throne. With harp in hand he touched the chords, like some later Scald he sang his saga to King Saul!” It really was rather fine—plain and simple too, monosyllabic, terse, and with a musical sibillation. Unfortunately one of the worthy preacher’s hearers told me afterwards with some displeasure that “he didn’t hold wi’ David being all sing-songing and scolding, he’d no opinion o’ that.” The stories of the queer mistakes which our hearers make in interpreting our sermons are simply endless, sometimes almost incredible. Nevertheless, no invention of the most inveterate story-teller could equal the facts which are matters of weekly experience.

“As yow was a saying in your sarment, ’tarnal mowing won’t du wirout ’tarnal making—yow mind that! yer ses, an’ I did mind it tu, an’ we got up that hay surprising!” Mr. Perry had just a little misconceived my words. I had quoted from Philip Van Arteveldt. “He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend. Eternity mourns that.”

Not many months ago I was visiting a good simple old man who was death-stricken, and had been long lingering on the verge of the dark river. “I’ve been a thinking, sir, of that little hymn as you said about the old devil when he was took bad. I should like to hear that again.” I was equal to the occasion.