red the ugliest in the county, but all admitted that it was one
of the most comfortable."[68] It remains to the present day pretty much as
Sydney Smith left it. A room on the ground-floor, next to the drawing-room,
served the threefold purposes of study, dispensary, and justice-room. As a
rule, he wrote his sermons and his articles for the _Edinburgh_ in the
drawing-room, not heeding the conversation of family and visitors; but in
the "study" he dosed his parishioners; and here, having been made a Justice
of the Peace, he administered mercy to poachers. He hated the Game-Laws as
they stood, and it stirred his honest wrath to reflect that "for every ten
pheasants which fluttered in the wood, one English peasant was rotting in
gaol." So strong was his belief in the contaminating effects of a
prisoner's life that he never, if he could help it, would commit a boy or
girl to gaol. He sought permission to accompany Mrs. Fry on one of her
visits to Newgate, and spoke of her ministry there as "the most solemn, the
most Christian, the most affecting, which any human eye ever
witnessed."[69] A pleasing trait of his incumbency at Foston was the
creation of allotment-gardens for the poor. He divided several acres of the
glebe into sixteenths, and let them, at a low rent, to the villagers. Each
allotment was just big enough to supply a cottage with potatoes, and to
support a pig. Cheap food for the poor was another of his excellent
hobbies. His Common-Place Book contains receipts for nourishing soups made
of rice and peas and flavoured with ox-cheek. He notes that more than
thirty people were comfortably fed with these concoctions at a penny a
head. After a bad harvest he and his family lived, like the labourers round
them, on unleavened cakes made from the damaged flour of the sprouted
wheat. His daughter writes--"The luxury of returning to bread again can
hardly be imagined by those who have never been deprived of it."

But, in spite of occasional difficulties of this description, which were
always faced and overcome with invincible good-humour, Sydney Smith's
fifteen years at Foston were happily and profitably spent. He was in the
fulness of his physical and intellectual vigour. He said of himself, "I am
a rough writer of Sermons," but his energy in delivering them awoke the
admiration of his sturdy flock.--

"When I began to thump the cushion of my pulpit, on first coming to
Foston, as is my wont when I preach, the accumu