For a few months he acted as chaplain in his cousin Lord Folyat's household, and was amused to find his position as spiritual adviser and curate of souls gave him a status slightly above that of the butler and, so far as cordiality went, distinctly below that of the huntsman who fed and trained the hounds. He comforted himself with the reflection that his condition was at any rate better than that of Parson Adams, though his deserts were less, and took steps to obtain work independently of his family. This greatly upset madam, his mother, who warned him that he might be jeopardising his chances of the next family living. Within himself he argued that, being by profession a shepherd of souls, he must not waste time in places where there was not one to be found. He did not, however, lay this argument before his mother, but accepted a curacy at one hundred and ten pounds in South Devon, on a pleasant estuary, in a little town that had been a seaport in old days, trading busily with France and the Netherlands, and once familiar ground to Francis Drake and many another Elizabethan adventurer. Here there might or might not be souls for his charge, but there was the sea, and romance, and a heronry, and woods that were a perfect paradise for birds. He went down to the place and wrote his mother a very fine literary description of its natural beauties, which he sent to her by the new penny post and promised that he would stay with her for six days before he entered upon his new life. He arrived to find her in her great four-poster bed, shrivelled and very little, and looking very old in the shadow of its massive hangings. Her appearance shocked him. He had never seen anybody die, and he had a strange feeling that he was being very unfairly treated, and he realised painfully that in honouring his father's memory and his mother he had enjoyed only a very unsatisfactory relationship. His brother William was in India; Peter was on the high seas, and no word was to be expected from him for three years or more. He was alone, and he felt ashamed of his incapacity to grapple with the situation. His mother, perhaps as a tactful tribute to the profession into which she had forced him, asked him to read the Bible, and automatically he turned to the Book of Ecclesiastes and read her the passage in the last chapter which contains some of the soundest and most neglected advice ever given to mankind. He made no attempt to reconcile it with Christian teaching and his work, but found himself delighting in the spiritual health of the words. His mother said: "Francis, you must read better than that." This rather irritated him, though he knew it was selfish and inappropriate at such a time. He replied: "Mother, I could have wished to come to see you in a red coat. It has been ordered that I should wear a black. I do not think I shall ever be a bishop, but I will do my best to remain a gentleman and to be worthy of the name I bear."