to be altered at his convenience the better. Let the
bell cease immediately."

But the sexton, a dogged, bovine, bullet-headed labourer, took no notice
whatever of this injunction, and although Mr Kenrick went into the
reading-desk, continued lustily to ring the bell until the whole
Hugginson family, furious that their dignity should thus be insulted,
sailed into church at the beginning of the psalms.

Next morning Mr Kenrick turned the sexton out of his place, and
received a most wrathful visit from Mr Hugginson, who, after pouring on
him a torrent of the most disgusting abuse, got scarlet in the forehead,
shook his stick in Mr Kenrick's face, flung his poverty in his teeth,
and left the cottage, vowing eternal vengeance.

With him went all the Fuzby population. It would be long to tell the
various little causes which led to Mr Kenrick's unpopularity among
them. Every clergyman similarly circumstanced may conjecture these for
himself; they resolved themselves mainly into the fact that Mr Kenrick
was abler, wiser, purer, better, more Christian, than they. His
thoughts were not theirs, nor his ways their ways.

"He had a daily beauty in his life
That made them ugly."

And so, to pass briefly and lightly, over an unpleasant subject, Fuzby
was brimming over with the concentrated meanness of petty malignant
natures, united in the one sole object of snubbing and worrying the
unhappy curate. To live among them was like living in a cloud of
poisonous flies. If Dante had known Fuzby-le-Mud, he could have found
for a really generous and noble spirit no more detestable or unendurable
inferno than this muddy English village.

The chief characteristic of Fuzby was a pestilential spirit of gossip.
There was no lying scandal, there was no malicious whisper, that did not
thrive with rank luxuriance in that mean atmosphere, which, at the same
time, starved up every great and high-minded wish. There was no
circumstance so minute that calumny could not insert into it a venomous
claw. Mr Kenrick was one of the most exemplary, generous, and
pure-minded of men; his only fault was quickness of temper. His noble
character, his conciliatory manners, his cultivated mind, his Christian
forbearance, were all in vain. He was poor, and he could not be a
toady: these were two unpardonable sins; and he, a true man, moved like
an angel among a set of inferior beings. For a time he struggled on.
He tried not to mind the lies they