Not another syllable was spoken on either side; but well did the vicar of Wrexhill keep his word. Public estimation and private good-will appeared for a time to resist all the efforts he could make to persuade the villagers, and the farmers round about, that Mr. Marsh was a very impious and dangerous man, and one whom it was dangerous to trust with their children. They knew better; they knew that he was honest, pains-taking, intelligent, patient, and strictly attentive to his religious duties. But constant dropping will wear away a stone; and constant malevolence, kept in constant action, by one who was not very scrupulous as to the truth or falsehood of any statement that tended to produce the effect he wished, at length began, like rust upon steel, to cover and hide its true colour and its real brightness. One by one his daily scholars fell away from him,--one by one the neighbouring farmers came with some civil reason for not finding the sending their boys so likely to answer as formerly; and one by one his distant patrons found out the same thing: so that soon after the vicar's marriage he had the great delight of hearing that Mr. Marsh was sent to prison because he could not pay his rent, that his furniture was seized for taxes, and his tidy little wife lying ill of a brain fever at a small public-house near the prison, with her children starving round her. The sort of inward chuckle with which the prosperous vicar received this bit of village gossip from his valet has no letters by which it can be spelt;--it was the hosannah of a fiend. The supplying Mr. Marsh's place in Wrexhill was one of the things that now demanded Mr. Cartwright's immediate attention; and notwithstanding the many delicious temptations to idleness which surrounded him, his love of power, stronger even than his love of luxury, led him to hunt for and to find an individual to fill the situation, whose perfect obedience to his will made the dominion of the village school worth counting among the gratifying rights and immunities of his enviable position.