‘Yes, sir,’ continued the deacon, not noticing the interruption, ‘and he died universally respected. He never made an enemy. He was all things to all men. Every Christmas morning and Good Friday he went to church, and it was quite beautiful to see how humble and happy he looked. “I never interfere in politics,” said he. “I am come here to preach the Gospel. I am not going to impair my usefulness by becoming a political partisan.” I am sure,’ continued the deacon, ‘if he had forgotten this, and attended a Chartist meeting, we should never have got the money from the gentry we did, when we had the old meeting-house done up.’ ‘But,’ said Wentworth, ‘he might have made some of the Chartists Christians, and that would have been better. It’s no use to get the meeting-house done up if the people don’t come into it. It seems to me such conduct as you praise is the way to create the evils we deplore. In the Saviour’s time the common people heard the Gospel gladly, and why should they not do so now?’ ‘Because they won’t, sir,’ said the deacon angrily. ‘Because they are dead in trespasses and sins; because they’re regular heathens—a drinking, swearing lot. Why, I should be ashamed to go near them, and if some of them were to come to chapel, I believe the members would leave the place at once. I am sure I should.’ The senior deacon was a good man, but he had his foibles. One of them was a due regard to his own worldly good. Most of the neighbouring gentry came to his shop. It was the best and the largest of the kind in the town. What would become of his customers if his minister went to a Chartist meeting? The thought was too horrible for words. Hence the interview with the parson, and his disappearance from the streets of Sloville for many a long day; not, however, till he gave a farewell address, which added fuel to the fire, or, in other words, made his deacons more implacable than ever. CHAPTER VIII. IN BOHEMIA. ‘What a donkey I am!’ was the exclamation of a tall, well-made young man, rather shabbily dressed—four or five years after the events recorded in the preceding chapter—as he stood clinging to a lamppost in Fleet Street very late one bright summer night. ‘I have been to Fairlop Fair, with instructions to do a gushing article, and I’m blessed if I can recollect anything about it, nor where my notes are. I was to be back by ten, and it is now midnight. Thank Heaven,’ continued the speaker, as he groped into his coat pocket, ‘my notes are there. I thought I’d left them behind in that bar-room where I was waiting, where everyone was so tight and so talkative. Steady, boy—steady, boy!’ continued the speaker, reluctantly depriving himself of the support of the lamp-post. ‘We shall be all right, and in time, after all.’