did not narrowly
examine; all water-pipes, flues, cisterns, and sewers underwent an
investigation; he even descended, in the care of his friend, so far
as to bore sundry boards in the floors with a bradawl.

Mr. Arabin accompanied him through the rooms, trying to look wise in
such domestic matters, and the other three also followed. Mrs. Grantly
showed that she had not herself been priestess of a parish twenty
years for nothing, and examined the bells and window-panes in a very
knowing way.

"You will, at any rate, have a beautiful prospect out of your own
window, if this is to be your private sanctum," said Eleanor. She
was standing at the lattice of a little room upstairs, from which the
view certainly was very lovely. It was from the back of the vicarage,
and there was nothing to interrupt the eye between the house and the
glorious gray pile of the cathedral. The intermediate ground, however,
was beautifully studded with timber. In the immediate foreground ran
the little river which afterwards skirted the city, and, just to the
right of the cathedral, the pointed gables and chimneys of Hiram's
Hospital peeped out of the elms which encompass it.

"Yes," said he, joining her. "I shall have a beautifully complete
view of my adversaries. I shall sit down before the hostile town and
fire away at them at a very pleasant distance. I shall just be able
to lodge a shot in the hospital, should the enemy ever get possession
of it, and as for the palace, I have it within full range."

"I never saw anything like you clergymen," said Eleanor; "You are
always thinking of fighting each other."

"Either that," said he, "or else supporting each other. The pity is
that we cannot do the one without the other. But are we not here
to fight? Is not ours a church militant? What is all our work but
fighting, and hard fighting, if it be well done?"

"But not with each other."

"That's as it may be. The same complaint which you make of me for
battling with another clergyman of our own church, the Mohammedan
would make against me for battling with the error of a priest of
Rome. Yet, surely, you would not be inclined to say that I should
be wrong to do battle with such as him. A pagan, too, with his
multiplicity of gods, would think it equally odd that the Christian
and the Mohammedan should disagree."

"Ah! But you wage your wars about trifles so bitterly."

"Wars about trifles," said he, "are always bitter, especially
among neighbo