So, in accordance with this resolution, the churchwardens waited on the vicar. The Rev. Henry Harding was, at that time, the Vicar of Exdale. He was not only an easy-going man and possessed of large private means, but he was also one of those unfortunately constituted persons who are with difficulty induced to make themselves disagreeable to any one. The churchwardens quite anticipated that they might find it hard to persuade him, even in so glaring a case as the present one, to do the something which ought to be done. Nor were their expectations, in this respect, doomed to meet with disappointment. "Am I to understand," asked the vicar, when, to a certain extent, the lamentable facts of the case had been laid before him, and as he leaned back in his easy chair he pushed his spectacles up on his forehead, "that you have come to complain to me because a gentleman, finding himself in straitened circumstances, desires to add to his income by means of contributions to the press?" That was not what they wished him to understand at all. Mr. Luxmare, the people's warden, endeavoured to explain. "It is this particular paper to which we object. It is a vile, and a scurrilous rag. Its very name is an offence. You are, probably, not acquainted with its character. I have here----" Mr. Luxmare was producing a copy of the offensive publication from his pocket, when the vicar stopped him. "I know the paper very well indeed," he said. Mr. Luxmare seemed slightly taken aback. But he continued--. "In that case you are well aware that it is a paper with which no decent person would allow himself to be connected." "I am by no means so sure of that." Mr. Harding pressed the tips of his fingers together, with that mild, but occasionally exasperating, air of beaming affability for which he was peculiar. "I have known some very decent persons who have allowed themselves to become connected with some extremely curious papers." As the people's warden, Mr. Luxmare, was conscious of an almost exaggerated feeling of responsibility. He felt that, in a peculiar sense, he represented the parish. It was his duty to impress the feelings of the parish upon the vicar. And he meant to impress the feeling of the parish upon the vicar now. Moreover, by natural constitution he was almost as much inclined to aggressiveness as the vicar was inclined to placability. He at once assumed what might be called the tone and manner of a prosecuting counsel. "This is an instance," and he banged his right fist into his left palm, "of a clergyman--a clergyman of our church, the national church, associating himself with a paper, the avowed and ostensible purpose of which is to pander to the depraved instincts of the lowest of the low. I say, sir, and I defy contradiction, that such an instance in such a man is an offence against good morals." Mr. Harding smiled--which was by no means what the people's warden had intended he should do.