"’Tis things like that we don’t expect and have a right to object to in a public house," declared Mr. Screech afterwards. "We come here for peace and quietness and a pint. At this rate ’the Dumpling’ will very soon want to end the evening with a prayer meeting; and I for one shall be very glad when he goes and us get a cheerfuller pattern of publican there." Many were of Billy’s mind. Two potmen in succession left ’The Corner House’ owing to the depressed atmosphere of that establishment; the regular guests held serious meetings to discuss the situation. Some were for strong measures; others held the evil must soon cure itself. "Either the poor soul will go melancholy mad and have to be taken from among us--and ’twill ask for half a dozen strong men to do it--or else the cloud will pass off," explained Mr. Moses. "Be it as ’twill, we can’t go on like this. I advise that we wait till the turn of the year; and then, if nothing happens, we’ll make a regular orderly deputation, with me and Mr. Bowden as ringleaders, and wait upon Sir Guy Flamank and explain to him that ’The Corner House’ under Shillabeer isn’t what it should be." "’Twould be better far," Ernest Maunder had said, "if the man would be as good as his word and retire. If we can urge him without unkindness to do so, he might get calmer and easier in his mind in private life." "Not him," prophesied Screech. "Take the life and company and stir of the bar from him, and he’d become a drivelling old mump-head in six months. As ’tis he may be seen half a dozen times in a week sitting on his wife’s grave, when he ought to be to work in his house." "Mr. Merle have said the same," admitted Charles Moses. "To me the man said it. ’I don’t like to have poor Shillabeer in the churchyard so often,’ was his word. ’Tisn’t seemly for the people to observe him with his hand over his face and his hat off beside him sitting there. To display his grief in this manner, after nearly fifteen years, is not true to nature, and I feel very alarmed about it.’ That was what his reverence said to me; and I answered that he echoed my very thought." "The man wants to be lifted to more wholesome ideas," declared Mr. Maunder. "Nobody can say of me that I’m against the Bible; but there’s times and seasons--a time for everything and everything in its time--as the Book says itself, I believe; but he thrusts Scripture into conversation and peppers talk with texts till free speech be smothered. He ought to go--to say it without feeling." And meantime the anti-social instinct in Shillabeer, filtering by secret ways through the old man’s brain, took another turn and led him upon a road none had foreseen. Vaguely at first he glimpsed it, and on his declining years a dark short cut to peace suddenly yawned.