hoir chiefly as an
excellent social and centralizing instrument. There had been none in
Mr. Preston's day. He was determined to have one, and a good one, and
by sheer energy he succeeded, delighting in his boyish way over the
opposition some of his novelties excited among the older and more
stiff-backed inhabitants.

'Let them talk,' he would say brightly to Catherine. 'They will come
round; and talk is good. Anything to make them think, to stir the pool!'

Of course that old problem of the agricultural laborer weighed upon
him--his grievances, his wants. He went about pondering the English land
system, more than half inclined one day to sink part of his capital in
a peasant-proprietor experiment, and engulfed the next in all the moral
and economical objections to the French system. Land for allotments,
at any rate, he had set his heart on. But in this direction, as in many
others, the way was barred. All the land in the parish was the Squire's,
and not an inch of the Squire's land would Henslowe let young Elsmere
have anything to do with if he knew it. He would neither repair, nor
enlarge the Workmen's Institute; and he had a way of forgetting the
Squire's customary subscriptions to parochial objects, always paid
through him, which gave him much food for chuckling whenever he passed
Elsmere in the country lanes. The man's coarse insolence and mean hatred
made themselves felt at every turn, besmirching and embittering.

Still it was very true that neither Henslowe nor the Squire could do
Robert much harm. His hold on the parish was visibly strengthening; his
sermons were not only filling the church with his own parishioners, but
attracting hearers from the districts round Murewell, so that even on
these winter Sundays there was almost always a sprinkling of strange
faces among the congregation; and his position in the county and diocese
was becoming every month more honorable and important. The gentry about
showed them much kindness, and would have shown them much hospitality
if they had been allowed. But though Robert had nothing of the
ascetic about him, and liked the society of his equals as much as most
good-tempered and vivacious people do, he and Catherine decided that
for the present they had no time to spare for visits and county society.
Still, of course, there were many occasions on which the routine of
their life brought them across their neighbors, and it began to be
pretty widely recognized that Elsmere w