"Come, Stringer, are you there? Get up behind as fast as you can. As it is, with these roads we shall be a longer time than I can spare getting to Weston. Is that you, Stokes? The master has been complaining of Samuel again. The boy's doing no good whatever at school." And without waiting for an answer, or taking any notice of Stephens, who was standing in the full light of the forge, Mr Brent drove quickly off towards the farm. Burge the blacksmith, who had come out to the door, and stood, lifting his cap with one hand, and passing the other through his straight black hair, was the first to make a remark upon the last-comer. "He bain't such a pleasant-spoken gentleman as old Passon Miles." "P'raps he bain't," said Stokes, gruffly; divided between injury on behalf of the culprit Samuel, and a fear of weakening what he looked upon as his late victory over Stephens and the dissenters. "P'raps you and me shouldn't be so pleasant nayther if us had to turn out to Wesson, wann us had done our day's work, to plaze the old missess." "Day's work!" said the blacksmith, coughing violently, and going back to his labour. "I'd give something to kep your hours. I sim, sometimes, a smith ain't got no hours. He's at everybody's call, worse luck to me." David had not heard the other men's remarks. He was standing at the door of the smithy where he had first stopped, with his eyes fixed upon the ground, and the red glow from the forge lighting that side of his face which was nearest it. These fits of abstraction were not uncommon with him, and, as something which they did not understand, and set down as not quite right, added to the disfavour with which he was commonly regarded by the people of Thorpe. David was quite aware of this disfavour. He was in the position of a reformer attempting to benefit society against its will. Each sin of which he heard, and each neglect, smote on his excitable nature as a crime on the part of those who might have prevented it. Driven in very much upon himself and his inward communings,--for the fervour of his opinions found as little favour in the eyes of his brother Wesleyans as in those of Churchmen, and he himself shrank in disgust from all that appeared to him to savour of worldliness and self-advancement,--the one thought that was always in his mind lost its fair proportions and grew as, alas, the best within us may grow, out of shape and out of bounds. All that opposed him seemed to be the especial opposition of the Devil, a conviction leading to its corollary, that hardly any means could be thought unlawful which tended to circumvent the evil one. He regarded Anthony Miles as the chief adversary raised up against him, and the great wrong he had done him he would not have undone, though it weighed like lead upon his conscience.