While the minds of many of the inhabitants of Walls End Castle had been disturbed in the manner narrated, the quiet little parish of King's Warren had been shaken out of its ordinary state of somniferous torpidity. To use Mrs. Dodd's words, "the government of the country had at last become awakened to the important services rendered to the Church by my dear father." The fact is, that a bishopric had fallen in, and that the Prime Minister, a notorious talker and time-server, and a very old servant of Her Majesty, was extremely anxious to perpetrate a great and glorious job. But the Prime Minister was a wise man; he knew very well that in trying to please everybody he would satisfy no one, and so he meant to please himself, and to appoint to the vacant see an old college chum of his own, a learned but harmless enthusiast, now a Don, who had once in his life perpetrated a very abstruse work upon the Greek particle. The first thing that the Prime Minister did was to lend an apparently willing ear to the suggestions of the various busybodies who under such circumstances always favour unfortunates in his position with their disinterested ideas upon the subject. Deputations from the two rival missionary societies waited upon him, lords temporal and lords spiritual had private interviews with him, and the heads of his party expressed their opinions to him freely but confidentially; he promised to give their suggestions what he called his earnest consideration, and then he bowed them out. But the Prime Minister was a man who invariably killed two birds with one stone. "I will obtain some cheap popularity," he thought, "and several good rounds of universal applause, by a master-stroke. I will _offer_ the bishopric to a simple parish clergyman." In the clerical world, to use a profane phrase, there were at least half-a-dozen favourites in the betting, and as many dark horses. When the _Thunderer_ appeared with an inspired article upon the fitness of a successful parish clergyman for the more onerous position of a bishop, great was the humming and disturbance in the clerical hive. Profound was the disappointment in the minds of the drones and dignitaries. Men who were performing archidiaconal functions heaped dust and ashes on their heads, crying aloud that the interests of the Church were being sacrificed to obtain an ephemeral popularity. But the breasts of the working bees throbbed with excitement; the vicars of parishes who had been long in harness, and had never met with the expensive misfortune of being haled by their bishop, or the terrible aggrieved parishioner, under the Church Discipline Act, before that greatest of all clerical bogies, Lord Penzance, and who would never have thought of undergoing six months' imprisonment for conscience' sake; men who knew a good glass of wine when they saw it; men who were apostles of the Blue Ribbon Army, fathers of large families of sons and daughters blessed in