ertain air of
distinction about him to anything in particular, unless it were his
delicate hands and well-shapen feet.

It was a great anomaly to the Milby mind that a canting evangelical
parson, who would take tea with tradespeople, and make friends of vulgar
women like the Linnets, should have so much the air of a gentleman, and
be so little like the splay-footed Mr. Stickney of Salem, to whom he
approximated so closely in doctrine. And this want of correspondence
between the physique and the creed had excited no less surprise in the
larger town of Laxeter, where Mr. Tryan had formerly held a curacy; for
of the two other Low Church clergymen in the neighbourhood, one was a
Welshman of globose figure and unctuous complexion, and the other a man
of atrabiliar aspect, with lank black hair, and a redundance of limp
cravat--in fact, the sort of thing you might expect in men who
distributed the publications of the Religious Tract Society, and
introduced Dissenting hymns into the Church.

Mr. Tryan shook hands with Mrs. Linnet, bowed with rather a preoccupied
air to the other ladies, and seated himself in the large horse-hair
easy-chair which had been drawn forward for him, while the ladies ceased
from their work, and fixed their eyes on him, awaiting the news he had
to tell them.

'It seems,' he began, in a low and silvery tone, 'I need a lesson of
patience; there has been something wrong in my thought or action about
this evening lecture. I have been too much bent on doing good to Milby
after my own plan--too reliant on my own wisdom.'

Mr. Tryan paused. He was struggling against inward irritation.

'The delegates are come back, then?' 'Has Mr. Prendergast given way?'
'Has Dempster succeeded?'--were the eager questions of three ladies at
once.

'Yes; the town is in an uproar. As we were sitting in Mr. Landor's
drawing-room we heard a loud cheering, and presently Mr. Thrupp, the
clerk at the bank, who had been waiting at the Red Lion to hear the
result, came to let us know. He said Dempster had been making a speech to
the mob out the window. They were distributing drink to the people, and
hoisting placards in great letters,--"Down with the Tryanites!" "Down
with cant!" They had a hideous caricature of me being tripped-up and
pitched head-foremost out of the pulpit. Good old Mr. Landor would insist
on sending me round in the carriage; he thought I should not be safe from
the mob; but I got down at the Crossways. The r