It had been a very dry autumn, and the periodical rains had been long delayed, so that the minister had been able to do much for the houses he had bought, called the Pottery. There had been but just rain enough to reveal the advantage of the wall he had built to compel the water to keep the wider street. Thoroughly dry and healthy it was impossible to make them, at least in the time; but it is one thing to have the water all about the place you stand on, and another to be up to the knees in it. Not at that point only, however, but at every spot where the water could enter freely, he had done what he could provisionally for the defense of his poor colony--for alas! how much among the well-to-do, in town or city, are the poor like colonists only!--and he had great hopes of the result. Stone and brick and cement he had used freely, and one or two of the people about began to have a glimmering idea of the use of money after a gospel fashion--that is, for thorough work where and _because_ it was needed. The curate was full of admiration and sympathy. But the whole thing gave great dissatisfaction to others not a few. For, as the currents of inundation would be somewhat altered in direction and increased in force by his obstructions, it became necessary for several others also to add to the defenses of their property, and this of course was felt to be a grievance. Their personal inconveniences were like the shilling that hides the moon, and, in the resentment they occasioned, blinded their hearts to the seriousness of the evils from which their merely temporary annoyance was the deliverance of their neighbors. A fancy of prescriptive right in their own comforts outweighed all the long and heavy sufferings of the others. Why should not their neighbors continue miserable, when they had been miserable all their lives hitherto? Those who, on the contrary, had been comfortable all their lives, and liked it so much, ought to continue comfortable--even at their expense. Why not let well alone? Or if people would be so unreasonable as to want to be comfortable too, when nobody cared a straw about them, let them make themselves comfortable without annoying those superior beings who had been comfortable all the time!--Persons who, consciously or unconsciously, reason thus, would do well to read with a little attention the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, wherein it seems recognized that a man's having been used to a thing may be just the reason, not for the continuance, but for the alteration of his condition. In the present case the person who most found himself aggrieved, was the dishonest butcher. A piece of brick wall which the minister had built in contact with the wall of his yard, would indubitably cause such a rise in the water at the descent into the area of his cellar, that, in order to its protection in a moderate flood--in a great one the cellar was always filled--the addition to its defense of