And thus relieved with a little ready cash and food, and cheered with the prospect of blankets and coals and clothes, for which tickets had been left, Carroty Bill was enabled at leisure to rejoice over the effects of his artful dodge, which was told to a crowd of applauding vagabonds, as rascally as himself; while the landlord of the public, already referred to, could not find too much to say on behalf of that Christian charity by which he expected to benefit more than anyone else in that dingy and poverty-stricken locality. The Vicar was quite justified so far as appearances went. It was an unhealthy habitation which he visited, and all the inmates looked sad and ill. As the Vicar left the apartment of Carroty Bill he knocked at the next door, inhabited by a hard-working shoemaker of freethought tendencies, who hated him and all his ways. The Vicar beat a hasty retreat, as he knew the sharpness of the shoemaker’s tongue. ‘We don’t want none of your cloth here,’ said the disciple of St. Crispin. ‘If there were a God, should we be as wretched as we are?’ ‘Yes, there is. I am His servant,’ said the Vicar. ‘You His servant? Why yer father bought yer the living, and a nice living it is; you are yer father’s servant, not the Lord’s.’ ‘But, my good man—’ said the Vicar. ‘Don’t “good man” me,’ was the angry reply. ‘But we come for your good.’ ‘That’s what you all say; and I’ll believe it when I see you and the likes of you give up that part of the tithes which was intended for the poor.’ ‘I come in the name of the Lord as His messenger,’ said the Vicar in his most commanding tones. ‘The Lord’s receiver, I think,’ said the shoemaker cynically, ‘for you get all you can in His name.’ ‘It is no use leaving anything here,’ said the Vicar to his curates. Nor was it. The shoemaker had been made an infidel, as many are, by hard work and poor pay, by want of human sympathy, by the greatness of his life-long sorrow. Wounded and bruised and fallen among thieves, the Jew and the Levite had passed by, and no Samaritan had come to his aid. The Gospel of glad tidings has been preached for ages by the Churches, chiefly to the rich and the respectable as they are called, and the poor have been sent empty away. Christian ministers of all denominations have hard work to do to make up for the shortcomings of the past.