rder their natural enemies; the fear and hatred of every one who was
false or unjust in the district, were he master or man; and the blessed
sight of women and children daily becoming more human and more homely, a
comfort to themselves and to their husbands and fathers.

These things, of course, took time, and had to be fought for with toil
and sweat of brain and heart, and with the life-blood poured out. All
that, Arthur had laid his account to give, and took as a matter of
course, neither pitying himself, nor looking on himself as a martyr,
when he felt the wear and tear making him feel old before his time, and
the stifling air of fever-dens telling on his health. His wife seconded
him in everything. She had been rather fond of society, and much admired
and run after before her marriage; and the London world to which she had
belonged pitied poor Fanny Evelyn when she married the young clergyman,
and went to settle in that smoky hole Turley; a very nest of Chartism
and Atheism, in a part of the country which all the decent families had
had to leave for years. However, somehow or other she didn't seem to
care. If her husband's living had been amongst green fields and near
pleasant neighbours she would have liked it better--that she never
pretended to deny. But there they were. The air wasn't bad, after all;
the people were very good sort of people--civil to you if you were civil
to them, after the first brush; and they didn't expect to work miracles,
and convert them all off-hand into model Christians. So he and she went
quietly among the folk, talking to and treating them just as they would
have done people of their own rank. They didn't feel that they were
doing anything out of the common way, and so were perfectly natural,
and had none of that condescension or consciousness of manner which so
outrages the independent poor. And thus they gradually won respect and
confidence; and after sixteen years he was looked up to by the whole
neighbourhood as the just man, the man to whom masters and men could
go in their strikes, and in all their quarrels and difficulties, and by
whom the right and true word would be said without fear or favour. And
the women had come round to take her advice, and go to her as a friend
in all their troubles; while the children all worshipped the very ground
she trod on.

They had three children, two daughters and a son, little Arthur, who
came between his sisters. He had been a very delicate boy