The chief male personages in this society were certainly the doctor and the clergyman. Curates came and curates went, and some of them were clever and some the reverse; but Mr. Stanley and Dr. Burnet went on for ever. They were of course invariably of all the dinner parties, but there the level of intelligence was not so high--the other gentlemen in the town and the less important ones in the country coming in as a more important element. But in the evening parties, which were popular in Sliplin during the winter, and the afternoon-tea parties which some people, who did not care to go out at night, tried hard to introduce in their place, they were supreme. It was astonishing how the doctor, so hard-worked a man, managed to find scraps of time for so many of these assemblages. He was never there during the whole of these symposia. He came very late or he went away very early, he put in half an hour between two rounds, or he ran in for ten minutes while he waited for his dog-cart. But the occasions were very rare on which he did not appear one time or another during the course of the entertainment. Mr. Stanley, of course, was always on the spot. He was a very dignified clergyman, though he had not risen to any position in the Church beyond that of Rector of Sliplin. He preached well, he read well, he looked well, he had not too much to do; he had brought up his motherless family in the most beautiful way, with never any entanglement of governesses or anything that could be found fault with for a moment. Naturally, being the father of a family, the eldest of which was twenty-two, he was not in his first youth; but very few men of forty-seven looked so young or so handsome and well set up. He took the greatest interest in the mental development of the Sliplin society, presiding at the University Extension as well as all the other meetings, and declaring publicly, to the great encouragement of all the other students, that he himself had “learned a great deal” from the Merovingians lectures and the Ceramic lectures, and those on the Arctic regions.