During all these troubled days he never lost his temper, or said bitter things: he believed, as he once told me in all modesty, that if he suffered it was for his sins, and that persecution was only a call to harder labour; and it appeared afterwards that he had gone out of his way to do a good turn to certain of his bitterest enemies. Indeed, I am now certain that they did not injure him at all; but one is also quite as certain that he was hindered and made ridiculous by certain of his own supporters. Certain young women of uncertain age who had been district visitors and carried tracts under the revered Canon, or had been brought up in various forms of Dissent, responded with enthusiasm to the Catholic Reformation. They wore large gold (or gilt) crosses, and were careful to use heavily crossed prayer-books; they attended early celebration, and were horrified at people taking the sacrament not fasting; they not only did obeisance to the altar, where there was no sacrament, and bowed at the name of Jesus, and crossed themselves in a very diligent and comprehensive fashion, but invented forms of devotion which even Jinks could not comprehend, and so scandalized the old clerk, who stuck by St. Agatha's, that he asked them one day during service if they were ill, and suggested that they should leave the church before things came to the worst Personally, as a close observer of this drama, I had no sympathy with the ill-natured suggestion that these devout females were moved by the fact that the priest of St Agatha's was unmarried, because no man was ever more careful in his intercourse with the other sex than my friend, and because this kind of woman--till she marries, and with modifications afterwards--has a mania for ritual and priests. This band, who called themselves the Sisters of St Agatha, and severely tried our unsentimental district, were a constant embarrassment to Jinks. They made the entire attendance at the daily services; they insisted on cleaning the chancel on their knees; they fluttered round the confused little man in the street; they could hardly be kept out of the Vicarage; they talked of nothing but saints' days and offices and vestments, till Jinks, the simplest and honestest of men, was tempted, for his sake and their own salvation, to entreat them to depart and return whence they had come. V