s mind in that
shape. He has talked not unfrequently, and heard very much about the
wills of old founders and the incomes arising from their estates,
during the last year or two; he did even, at one moment, feel a
doubt (since expelled by his son-in-law's logic) as to whether Lord
Guildford was clearly entitled to receive so enormous an income
as he does from the revenues of St Cross; but that he himself was
overpaid with his modest eight hundred pounds,--he who, out of that,
voluntarily gave up sixty-two pounds eleven shillings and fourpence a
year to his twelve old neighbours,--he who, for the money, does his
precentor's work as no precentor has done it before, since Barchester
Cathedral was built,--such an idea has never sullied his quiet, or
disturbed his conscience.

Nevertheless, Mr Harding is becoming uneasy at the rumour which he
knows to prevail in Barchester on the subject. He is aware that, at
any rate, two of his old men have been heard to say, that if everyone
had his own, they might each have their hundred pounds a year, and
live like gentlemen, instead of a beggarly one shilling and sixpence
a day; and that they had slender cause to be thankful for a miserable
dole of twopence, when Mr Harding and Mr Chadwick, between them, ran
away with thousands of pounds which good old John Hiram never intended
for the like of them. It is the ingratitude of this which stings Mr
Harding. One of this discontented pair, Abel Handy, was put into the
hospital by himself; he had been a stone-mason in Barchester, and had
broken his thigh by a fall from a scaffolding, while employed about
the cathedral; and Mr Harding had given him the first vacancy in the
hospital after the occurrence, although Dr Grantly had been very
anxious to put into it an insufferable clerk of his at Plumstead
Episcopi, who had lost all his teeth, and whom the archdeacon hardly
knew how to get rid of by other means. Dr Grantly has not forgotten
to remind Mr Harding how well satisfied with his one-and-sixpence a
day old Joe Mutters would have been, and how injudicious it was on the
part of Mr Harding to allow a radical from the town to get into the
concern. Probably Dr Grantly forgot, at the moment, that the charity
was intended for broken-down journeymen of Barchester.

There is living at Barchester, a young man, a surgeon, named John
Bold, and both Mr Harding and Dr Grantly are well aware that to him
is owing the pestilent rebellious feeling whi