"Thank you." The curate smiled, the vicar would almost have rather he had cried. "There is one other point. If the paper were a bad paper, in a moral or in a religious sense, under no sense of circumstances would I consent to do its work or to take its wage. But if any one has told you that it is a bad paper, in that sense, you have been misinformed. It is simply a cheap so-called humorous journal. Perhaps not over-refined. It is intended for the _olla podrida_. It is printed on poor paper, and the printing is not good. The illustrations are not always in the best of taste and are sometimes simply smudges. But looking at the reading matter as a whole, it is probably equal to that which is contained, week after week, in some of the high-priced papers which find admission to every house." "I am bound to say that sometimes when I have been travelling I have purchased the paper myself, and I have never seen anything in it which could be justly called improper." "Nor I. I submit, sir, that we curates are already sufficiently cribbed, cabined, and confined. If narrow-minded, non-literary persons are to have the power to forbid our working for decent journals to which they themselves, for some reason, may happen to object, our case is harder still." The vicar rose from his chair. "Quite so. There is a great deal in what you say--I quite realise it, Mr. Plumber. The laity are already too much disposed to trample on us clerics. I will think the matter over--think the matter over, Mr. Plumber. My dear sir, what is that?" There was a crashing sound on the floor overhead, which threatened to bring the study ceiling down. It was followed by such a deafening din, as if an Irish faction fight was taking place upstairs, that even the curate seemed to be disturbed. "Some of the boys have been making themselves a pair of boxing gloves, and I am afraid they are practising with them in their bedroom." "Oh," said the vicar. That was all he did say, but the "Oh" was eloquent. "To think," he told himself as he departed, "that a scholar and a gentleman should be compelled to live in a place like that, with a helpless wife and a horde of unruly lads, and should be driven to scribble nonsense for such a rag as _Skittles_ in order to provide himself with the means to keep them all alive--it seems to me that it must be, in some way, a disgrace to the English Church that such things should be."