Perhaps they might have been a little less surprised could one of them have taken down an old volume of Dr South's sermons from the vicar's library shelves, and have read these words to his fellows: "Men are infidels, not because they have sharper wits, but because they have corrupter wills; not because they reason better, but because they live worse." Assuredly this was true of the infidelity in Crossbourne. And what sort of a home was William Foster's? The house itself looked well enough as you approached it. Those houses of a humbler stamp on either side of it had doors which opened at once from the street into the parlour or living-room; but to Foster's dwelling there was a small entrance-hall, terminating in an archway, beyond which were a large parlour, a kitchen, and a staircase leading to the upper rooms. There was an air of ambition about everything, as though the premises, like their occupiers, were aiming to be something above their station, while at the same time a manifest absence of cleanliness and neatness only presented a sort of satirical contrast to the surrounding grandeur. On either side of the entrance-hall, and just under the archway, was a plaster-of-Paris figure, nearly as large as life--that on the right-hand being a representation of Bacchus, and that on the left of a nymph dancing. But the female image had long since lost its head, and also one of its arms--the latter being still in existence, but being hung for convenience' sake through the raised arm of Bacchus, making him look like one of those Hindu idols which are preposterously figured with a number of superfluous limbs. If the effect of this transference of the nymph's arm to its companion statue was rather burlesque than ornamental, the disconnected limb itself was certainly not without its use, small fragments of it being broken off from time to time for the purpose of whitening the door-steps and the hall-flags when the hearthstone could not readily be found. Within the archway, over the parlour door, was a plaster bust of Socrates; but this had met with no better treatment than the statues, having accidentally got its face turned to the wall as though in disgrace, or as if in despair of any really practical wisdom being allowed to have sway in the sceptic's household.