buffoonery, uncharitable malice, and untruth, were incurring a serious responsibility. In short, public opinion was told in plain language exactly how it ought to regard the campaign. Great newspapers spoke out during one fortnight with singular unanimity. Street meetings were promptly broken up by the police, and after some of the Luther Lecturers had been to prison, finding that public interest in their "martyrdom" was languishing, they subsided into quiet, devotional meetings on the sands at popular watering-places. Whenever Mr. Hamlyn hired a hall and lectured on the iniquities of the local clergy, he was confronted by the spectacle of a sharp-faced man who took down every word of his utterances with scrupulous fidelity. It was always the same machine-like man, in Liverpool or in Plymouth, in Bath or Dundee--there he was. The agitator's eloquence was considerably checked. He was in no condition to sustain an action for slander or libel in which, he well knew, some poor clergyman would somehow be able to brief all the great hawk-faced leaders of the bar, gentlemen with whom Mr. Hamlyn wished to have as little as possible to do. At such open-air meetings as were permitted, some unobtrusive stranger was generally to be found distributing leaflets among the crowd, which resembled nothing so much as the literature of the Luther League itself in its general "get-up" and appearance. On perusal, however, it proved to be of quite a different tenor, being nothing else than extracts from the best-known English newspapers on Mr. Hamlyn and his mission. This was very trying and disturbed the harmony of many meetings. In the assemblies convened at halls hired for the occasion,--admission by ticket only,--it frequently happened that some well-known local resident, who could not be denied, made his appearance, and with a few weighty words entirely changed the character of the meeting. The reports from his myrmidons all over the country, which reached Mr. Hamlyn in the Strand, showed a series of counter-moves which alarmed him in their neatness and ingenuity. It had been for months a pleasing habit of the peripatetic Protestants under the Hamlyn banner to visit churches and make notes of the ornaments therein, afterwards lecturing on them in their own inimitable and humorous manner to crowds in back streets. Mr. Moffatt, indeed--the young gentleman who had forsaken the plumbing and gas-fitting industry to become incandescent and watery on the Protestant war-path--had more than once broken a small crucifix with an umbrella. The lecturers found, however, that, as if by some concerted action, church doors were locked wherever they might go. The poor fellows' hunger for the sight of candlesticks and sanctuary lamps was hardly ever gratified now, and they were compelled to the somewhat ignominious expedient of nailing the bulls of Mr. Hamlyn to the doors of sacred buildings and going gloomily away.