commenced seemed so impossible, that I was lost in amazement. Yet there could be no mistake. The beginning of the letter spoke for itself; and strange as the end of it was, my name is Robert, and therefore how could I doubt that I was the "Bob" to whom he addressed himself? I read and re-read the document, and the more I read it, the more was I distressed at the commencement of it, and the more I was bewildered at its close. Perhaps, I thought, at last, the familiarity of the conclusion. is intended as a salve for the asperity of the earlier portion; but then I noticed, for the first time, that the two first sheets (which were evidently and unmistakeably addressed to myself) were written upon very common straw paper, while the last was upon "super-satin note," smooth as polished ivory, and almost as thick as card. The truth flashed upon me. In spite of his care to adapt his paper to his correspondents, Mr. Soaper had inclosed a sheet in my letter which was never intended for my eye; and I had most unluckily perused what was designed for another person. CHAPTER VI. MORE KICKS THAN HALFPENCE. "I will drain him dry as hay: Weary seven-nights, nine times nine, Macbeth. TEN months have elapsed since my journal has seen any entry on its pages beyond the amount of parish work got through day by day, and the texts of the sermons written, and the names of the books read. As regards the latter point, I am terribly behind-hand. No progress in Hebrew; and not a line of Greek since the beginning of summer. The journal is of no great consequence, its place has been well occupied by the daily letter to my dear mother, to whom my correspondence seems a great solace. If it is out of the question she should come here, (and the Vicar and Mrs. Soaper set their faces so vigorously against it on the ground that my time would be spent in waiting on an invalid, that I hardly can entertain a further hope on the subject) it is clearly my duty to supply the void produced by this lengthened separation as fully as I can; yet I often find it difficult to avoid putting things in my letters which will reveal that matters here are not very comfortable, and communicating my own depression of spirits to her. I ought to have made some stipulation with the Vicar as to holydays, before I undertook the Curacy. He now tells me that I had full knowledge of the delicate state of his health, and that it was unreasonable on my part to expect leave of absence; that he cannot grant any now, nor can he name a time when he will. I must be patient therefore. It is a cross, no doubt, but how much heavier would it be, if my mother's state of health had been growing worse; if there was any increased anxiety about her; or if Mary were not with her. I dare say that some day it will come into the Vicar's mind that Curates need occasional relaxation as well as Incumbents, or perhaps something may set him thinking of his own mother, and then he will volunteer to give me a holyday. I believe I should do my work better, for I am getting rather knocked up. It has been a year of hard work. I have had to make myself acquainted with the people here, and there has been so much sickness, that I have been on my legs, for the most part, all day long. And I have had to sit up late at night, in order to prepare for my ordination to the Priesthood. I expected that when the Soapers came back from Brighton I should have more leisure, but the event has been altogether different. I suppose it is some aggravated form of dyspepsia that makes him irritable, and hard to please, if, which is most likely, the fault is not altogether in myself. But somehow or other he seems never to have forgiven me for having made acquaintance with the Marquis of Kingsbury without his intervention. He has recurred to it again and again, and almost takes the repairs which have been carried out at the Moorcot Hovels as a personal injury. Such people as the Ashes, he says, ought to have been let to lie on the bed they had made for themselves; their wretched condition was only a fitting punishment for a fellow who had poached lands and fished waters which Mr. Soaper himself had hired at a considerable yearly expense. My suggestion that the offender was now in his grave, and that it would be better to reclaim his surviving family than to punish them by letting them linger on in disease and filth, gave him so much offence that I had no other course left than to remain silent. I really think that he lays it at my door that six months after the Marquis's visit to Roost Mr. Tite had a paralytic seizure, and has since resigned his agency. Mr. Soaper declares that it was anxiety of mind which brought on the seizure, and that he had never known anxiety till the Marquis began the sanitary inspection of his cottages at Roost, and had the land drained, and pigstyes removed, and doors and windows opened, and tiled roofs substituted for thatch, and the improvements made which are still in progress, and the sight of which always puts the Vicar out of humour. There is no means of repelling a charge of this sort, even if it were worth while. It is impossible to prove a negative. All I know is, that Mr. Tite hunted three days a week to the end of the season, and that even if the course I took had any effect in impairing his health, I should not have done my duty if I had adopted any other. What is right must be done, and consequences must be left to the ordering of Providence. But why do I write in this strain? If the year has brought with it its share of trials and anxieties, (and who is safe for a moment without them ?) it has been accompanied with the greatest blessings. It has seen me fairly landed in the profession on which my heart has been long set: it has placed me in a field of work in which there is very much to learn, and in which there is very much to discipline me, and to brace me in all those points in which I am full of infirmity and weakness. I have received a great deal of kindness, and I have found a friend where I most desired to find one, in the Bishop of Chadsminster. I am not sure, indeed, that his having noticed me has not rather increased than diminished my difficulties here, but I feel that whatever my difficulties may be, I can turn to him as really being a "Father in GOD." They say that now-a-days a Bishop's only care is not to commit himself; that he will be ready enough to censure any of his clergy who take the unpopular side of any question, and subject themselves to the railing accusations of the newspapers, but that as to advising them how to act in doubtful cases, or throwing the shield of his authority over them in order to protect them, it is what he dare not do. I have heard it declared that the invariable answer of a Bishop to one that seeks his counsel is this: You must do what you think best, and when you have done it, I will tell you whether I approve it or no." Not such a prelate is he who presides over the diocese of Chadsminster! If ever a man entered his diocese without friends, or interest, a man who might be snubbed without any fears of his resenting it, or arbitrarily extinguished, as Bishops can extinguish curates,— without any probability of an appeal to justice or equity, it was myself. And yet from the moment I became connected with his diocese, he made me feel that he took a paternal interest in me. He gave me the promise that he would keep his eye upon me, and he faithfully kept it. He had a long conversation with me about Roost, and how I was getting on, when I was at the Palace before the last Ordination; when he was staying at Thorswoldestone Castle in the summer he rode over, and called upon me; and he spoke to me very kindly at the Visitation. Whether, in consequence of what he saw here he wrote anything to the Vicar, I have no means of knowing, but I rather suspect it. He was not pleased with these lodgings, or with the school, or with the state of the Church, or with the paucity of the services,-things which he saw with his own eyes, or matters into which he inquired; he questioned me very closely as to changes which I wished to make, but to which the Vicar would not consent, and some of them he desired me to announce to the Vicar that he had insisted on. I have noticed that these have been very sore subjects ever since, and it has been hinted by Mrs. Soaper that " some people know how to curry favour with Bishops at the expense of other people." Poor lady, I think she expected me to be overwhelmed with confusion, but I could not summon up even enough of guilty feeling to make me blush. One thing I confess has vexed and disappointed me very much. The Vicar has refused me the use of the |