At the western end of the village, beyond the alehouse, stood the church, with two or three yews darkening the crowded graveyard. The vicarage was close at hand, a sombre little house, with a flagged path leading to its dusky porch. Mitchelhurst was not happy in its vicars. The parish was too small to attract the heroic enthusiasts who are ready to live and die for the unhealthy and ignorant crowds of our great cities. And the house was too poor, and the neighbourhood too uninteresting, for any kindly country gentleman, who chanced to have "the Reverend" written before his name, to come and stable his horses, and set up his liberal housekeeping, and preach his Sunday sermons there. No one chose Mitchelhurst, so "those few sheep in the wilderness" were left to those who had no choice, and the vicars were almost always discontented elderly men. As a rule they died there, a vicar of Mitchelhurst being seldom remembered by the givers of good livings. The incumbent at this time was a feeble archæologist, who coughed drearily in his damp little study, and looked vaguely out at the world from a narrow and mildewed past. As he stepped from the shadowy porch, blinking with tired eyes, he would pause on the path, which looked like a row of flat unwritten tombstones, and glance doubtfully right and left. Probably he had some vague idea of going into the village, but in nine cases out of ten he turned aside to the graveyard, and sauntered musingly in the shadow of the old yews, or disappeared into the church, where there were two or three inscriptions just sufficiently defaced to be interesting. He fancied he should decipher them one day, and leave nothing for his successor to do, and he haunted them in that hope. When he went into the street he spoke kindly to the women at the doors, with an obvious forgetfulness of names and circumstances which made him an object of contemptuous pity. They could not conceive how any one in his senses could make such foolish mistakes, and were inclined to look on the Established Church as a convenient provision for weak-minded gentlefolks. They grinned when he had gone by, and repeated his well-meant inquiries, plaiting all the time. It was only natural that the vicar should prefer his parishioners dead. They did not then indulge in coarse laughter, they never described unpleasant ailments, and they were neatly labelled with their names, or else altogether silent concerning them.