ttled
beer; while with very little encouragement Arthur launched into his home
history, and the prayer-bell put them both out sadly when it rang to
call them to the hall.

From this time Arthur constantly spoke of his home, and above all, of
his father, who had been dead about a year, and whose memory Tom soon
got to love and reverence almost as much as his own son did.

Arthur's father had been the clergyman of a parish in the Midland
counties, which had risen into a large town during the war, and upon
which the hard years which followed had fallen with fearful weight. The
trade had been half ruined; and then came the old, sad story, of masters
reducing their establishments, men turned off and wandering about,
hungry and wan in body, and fierce in soul, from the thought of wives
and children starving at home, and the last sticks of furniture going to
the pawnshop; children taken from school, and lounging about the dirty
streets and courts, too listless almost to play, and squalid in rags
and misery; and then the fearful struggle between the employers and
men--lowerings of wages, strikes, and the long course of oft-repeated
crime, ending every now and then with a riot, a fire, and the county
yeomanry. There is no need here to dwell upon such tales: the Englishman
into whose soul they have not sunk deep is not worthy the name. You
English boys, for whom this book is meant (God bless your bright faces
and kind hearts!), will learn it all soon enough.

Into such a parish and state of society Arthur's father had been thrown
at the age of twenty-five--a young married parson, full of faith,
hope, and love. He had battled with it like a man, and had lots of fine
Utopian ideas about the perfectibility of mankind, glorious humanity,
and such-like, knocked out of his head, and a real, wholesome Christian
love for the poor, struggling, sinning men, of whom he felt himself one,
and with and for whom he spent fortune, and strength, and life, driven
into his heart. He had battled like a man, and gotten a man's reward--no
silver tea-pots 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
o