ulled down, and as they were all even over-full, he must contrive to
build first. Nor until that was done, could he effect much toward
rendering the best of them fit for human habitation.

Some of the householders in the lower part of the adjoining street shook
their heads when they saw what the bricklayers were about. They had
reason to fear they were turning the water more upon them; and it seemed
a wrong that the wretched cottages which had from time immemorial been
accustomed to the water, should be now protected from it at the cost of
respectable houses! It did not occur to them that it might be time for
Lady Fortune to give her wheel a few inches of a turn. To common minds,
custom is always right so long as it is on their side.

In the meantime the chapel in the park at Nestley had been advancing,
for the rector, who was by nature no dawdler where he was interested,
had been pushing it on; and at length on a certain Sunday evening in the
autumn, the people of the neighborhood having been invited to attend,
the rector read prayers in it, and the curate preached a sermon. At the
close of the service the congregation was informed that prayers would be
read there every Sunday evening, and that was all. Mrs. Bevis, honest
soul, the green-mantled pool of whose being might well desire a wind, if
only from a pair of bellows, to disturb its repose, for not a fish moved
to that end in its sunless deeps--I say deeps, for such there must have
been, although neither she nor her friends were acquainted with any
thing there but shallows--was the only one inclined to grumble at the
total absence of ceremonial pomp: she did want her husband to have the
credit of the great deed.

About the same time it was that Juliet again sought the cottage at
Owlkirk, with the full consciousness that she went there to meet her
fate. Faber came to see her every day, and both Ruber and Niger began
to grow skinny. But I have already said enough to show the nature and
course of the stream, and am not bound to linger longer over its noise
among the pebbles. Some things are interesting rather for their results
than their process, and of such I confess it is to me the love-making of
these two.--"What! were they not human?" Yes: but with a truncated
humanity--even shorn of its flower-buds, and full only of variegated
leaves. It shall suffice therefore to say that, in a will-less sort of a
way, Juliet let the matter drift; that, although she withheld ex