a decided success in life.

Hadleigh until very recently had been a perpetual curacy, and the
perpetual curate in charge had lived in the large, shabby house with
the green door on the Braidwood Road, as it was called. There had been
some talk of a new vicarage, but as yet the first brick had not been
laid, the building-committee had fallen out on the question of the
site, and nothing had been definitely arranged: there was a good deal
of talk, too, about the church restoration, but at the present moment
nothing had been done.

Mr. Drummond had not been disturbed in his mind by the delay of the
building-committee in the matter of the new vicarage, but on the topic
of the church restoration he had been heard to say very bitter
things,--far too bitter, it was thought, to proceed from the lips of
such a new-comer. It is not always wise to be outspoken, and when Mr.
Drummond expressed himself a little too frankly on the ugliness of the
sacred edifice, which until lately had been a chapel-of-ease, he had
caused a great deal of dissatisfaction in the mind of his hearers; but
when the young vicar, still strongly imbued with the beauties of
Oxford architecture, had looked round blankly on the great square pews
and galleries, and then at the wooden pulpit, and the Ten Commandments
that adorned the east end, he was not quite so sure in his mind that
his position was as enviable as that of other men.

Church architecture was his hobby, and, if the truth must be told, he
was a little "High" in his views; without attaching himself to the
Ultra-Ritualistic party, he was still strongly impregnated with many
of their ideas; he preferred Gregorian to Anglican chants, and would
have had no objection to incense if his diocesan could have been
brought to appreciate it too.

An ornate service was decidedly to his taste. It was, therefore, a
severe mortification when he found himself compelled to minister
Sunday after Sunday in a building that was ugly enough for a
conventicle, and to listen to the florid voices of a mixed choir,
instead of the orderly array of men and boys in white surplices to
which he had been accustomed. If he had been combative by nature,--one
who loved to gird his armor about him and to plunge into every sort of
_melee_,--he would have rejoiced after a fashion at the thought of the
work cut out for him, of bringing order and beauty out of this chaos;
but he was by nature too impatient. He would have condemned and