red that his benevolence should be used
in a way that would bring upon him no further responsibility and
no questionings from people whom he did not know and could not
understand.

The Rev. Oliphant Outhouse had been Rector of St.
Diddulph's-in-the-East for the last fifteen years, having married
the sister of Sir Marmaduke Rowley,--then simply Mr. Rowley, with a
colonial appointment in Jamaica of L120 per annum,--twelve years
before his promotion, while he was a curate in one of the populous
borough parishes. He had thus been a London clergyman all his life;
but he knew almost as little of London society as though he had held
a cure in a Westmoreland valley. He had worked hard, but his work had
been altogether among the poor. He had no gift of preaching, and had
acquired neither reputation nor popularity. But he could work;--and
having been transferred because of that capability to the temporary
curacy of St. Diddulph's,--out of one diocese into another,--he had
received the living from the bishop's hands when it became vacant.

A dreary place was the parsonage of St. Diddulph's-in-the-East for
the abode of a gentleman. Mr. Outhouse had not, in his whole parish,
a parishioner with whom he could consort. The greatest men around
him were the publicans, and the most numerous were men employed in
and around the docks. Dredgers of mud, navvies employed on suburban
canals, excavators, loaders and unloaders of cargo, cattle drivers,
whose driving, however, was done mostly on board ship,--such and
such like were the men who were the fathers of the families of St.
Diddulph's-in-the-East. And there was there, not far removed from the
muddy estuary of a little stream that makes its black way from the
Essex marshes among the houses of the poorest of the poor into the
Thames, a large commercial establishment for turning the carcasses of
horses into manure. Messrs. Flowsem and Blurt were in truth the great
people of St. Diddulph's-in-the-East; but the closeness of their
establishment was not an additional attraction to the parsonage.
They were liberal, however, with their money, and Mr. Outhouse was
disposed to think,--custom perhaps having made the establishment
less objectionable to him than it was at first,--that St.
Diddulph's-in-the-East would be more of a Pandemonium than it now
was, if by any sanitary law Messrs. Flowsem and Blurt were compelled
to close their doors. "Non olet," he would say with a grim smile when
the chari