was common for people to shut their houses and do this at that season of the year, but their blind malice was too eager to remember this. Another person by continually dunning a poor debtor to pay him half a sovereign had driven him to commit suicide! So ran their bitter tongues. Backbiting is the curse of village life, and seems to keep people by its effects upon the mind far more effectually in the grip of poverty than the lowness of wages. They become so saturated with littleness that they cannot attempt anything, and have no enterprise. To transplant them to the freer atmosphere of a great city, or of the Far West, is the only means of cure. At this particular village they were exceptionally given to backbiting, perhaps because everybody was more than usually related to everybody; they hated each other and vilified each other with pre-eminent energy. The poorest man, half starving, would hardly do a job for a farmer because--because--because he did not know why, except that nothing was too bad to be said of him; the poorest washerwoman with hungry children would not go and do a day's work for Mrs. So-and-so, because 'she beant nobody, she beant no better than we; beant a-going to work for her.' This malice was not directed towards strangers, against whom it is natural to heave half a brick, but against their own old neighbours. They tore each other to pieces, they were perfect cannibals with the tongue, perfect Lestrigonians. They never said 'good morning' to an equal, or lifted their hats to a lady; a jerk of the head, say about half an inch from the perpendicular, was their utmost greeting; their manners were about as pleasant as those of cattle might be could they be dressed like human beings. True, Bethel was of modern date, but they had had resident vicars for centuries; and where had they been, and where was the humanising tendency of much-vaunted Christianity? Could not three centuries soften a little village? I will do something for them if I can, for the credit of the race at large; they shall not be without an excuse if I can help it. Perhaps it was because there were no resident squires, perhaps because a good many of them had little plots of land; still they were Lestrigonians, and no doubt the row between the elder and the pastor was really due to this malice and uncharitableness. How curious it seems to a philosopher that so much religion should be accompanied by such bitter ill-feeling!--true religion, too, for these Lestrigonians were most seriously in earnest in their chapelling. Yet no doubt they fomented the row, for the pastor himself was much too clever a man to proceed to such extremities. By nature he was a fluent speaker, rising to eloquence as eloquence is understood among that kind of audience. He carried them with him, quite swept them away. They came to hear him from miles round about; there were plenty of other chapels, but no one like the man at Bethel. Once they came they always came.