y must feel the disadvantages of living in such a back-water. He
gave them credit for the wish to advance could they but find the way.
All they needed was leadership, which Canon Horniblow--evidently past
his work--was powerless to supply. He, Sawyer, came as a pioneer. Once
they grasped that fact they would rally to him. The good Miss Minetts
were rallying hard, so to speak, already. Oh! there was excellent
material in Deadham among the gentlefolk. It merely needed working,
needed bringing out.

From the lower, the wage-earning class, sunk as it was in ignorance, he
must, he supposed, expect but a poor response, opposition not impossibly.
Opposition would not daunt him. You must be prepared to do people good,
if not with, then against their will. He was here to make them rebel
against and shake off the remnants of the Dark Ages amid which they so
extraordinarily appeared still to live. He had no conception so low a
state of civilization could exist within little over a hundred miles of
the metropolis!--It was a man's work, anyhow, and he must put his back
into it. Must organize--word of power--organize night classes, lectures
with lantern slides, social evenings, a lads' club. Above all was there
room and necessity for this last. The Deadham lads were very rowdy, very
unruly. They gathered at corners in an objectionable manner; hung about
the public-house. He must undersell the public-house by offering counter
attractions. Amongst the men he suspected a sad amount of drinking. Their
speech, too, was so reprehensibly coarse. He had heard horrible language
in the village street. He reproved the offenders openly, as was his duty,
and his admonitions were greeted with a laugh, an insolent, offensive,
jeering laugh.

Sawyer cut at the dark straggling furzes bordering the path with his
walking-stick. Recollection of that laugh made him go red about the ears;
made his skin tingle and his eyes smart. It represented an insult not
only to himself but to his cloth. Yet he'd not lost control of himself,
he was glad to remember, though the provocation was rank--

He cut at the furze again, being by nature combative. And--stopped short,
with a start, a tremor running through him. Something rustled, scuttled
away amongst the bushes, and something flapped upward behind him into the
thick lowering sky above. A wailing cry--whether human, or of bird or
beast, he was uncomfortably ignorant--came out of the mist ahead, to be
answered by