“Let it be enough,” he wrote to Alexander Carkeek, “until at a Greater Bar you shall stand condemned, that you know, and I know, and so does your vicar, that you have committed simony in your heart.” So ended an episode with which I have dealt thus fully—at what a cost can well be imagined—partly because, as I have said, the contemporary newspaper accounts of it were either misleading or deliberately spiteful, but chiefly because it was the means adopted by Providence of uniting us still more closely with the Stools. That this was an end possible of achievement otherwise, I have never disguised my private opinion. But since it was to lead to my own ultimate matrimony, I have always considered it best to suspend judgment; and I cannot but feel convinced that my readers will share the relief with which I now begin to approach this distant event. For it was still distant. Let there be no mistake about that. And in the particular form in which it was about to be adumbrated, I ought not to conceal, perhaps, that for several years I found it extremely distasteful. Nevertheless it came about, and even when Ezekiel first suggested it, deeply repugnant though the idea seemed to me, I could not help recognizing and suitably acknowledging the generosity with which it had been put forward. “Dear Augustus,” he said, “each of my sisters will receive an equal portion of my father’s estate, and if it would be any help to you, I should be only too glad to give you one of them in marriage.” This was on the Sunday evening, I remember, the sixth after we had lost our action against the _Camberwell Observer_, and the seventeenth after my father had been mulcted in costs by the infamous judgment of the Court of Appeal—upon which we had decided, after careful investigation, to transfer our worship to St. Nicholas, Newington Butts. A quiet edifice, devoid of a lectern, yet within a few yards of the tram-lines, it had seemed to us both, although it had various drawbacks, as suitable a receptacle as we should be likely to find for the very modified degree of worship of which my father now remained capable. “After what has happened,” he said, “it is of course a subject in which I can scarcely be expected to take much further interest. But the church appears clean and its clergy seem obliging, if not particularly intelligent.”