This reply to the minister’s inquiry produced a half-frightened smile on the faces of some of the congregation. It must, however, be admitted, that in general to the simple-minded farmers of Middlebrook, unaccustomed as they were to much allegory or metaphor, their “neighbours” were simply the plain, hard-featured, but kindly, men and women who lived on the farms adjoining their own, and the but little more stylish men and women whose humble homes lined the streets of Middlebrook. But the Rev. Mr. Holworthy was looking for a very different neighbour from any of these, and he therefore only frowned at the reply of half-witted Ira Aliter. And in pursuit of this anomalous, hypothetical neighbour, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy may then be said to have proceeded to compass sea and land. He sought him in the far-off jungles of India, on the trackless wastes of Africa, among the nomadic hordes of Tartary, and in the rigorous confines of Siberia. No land known to be inhabited by the human race was too distant or too inaccessible for the broad sweep of his resistless benevolence to reach. Indeed, if man had been amphibious, there is but little doubt that he would have dragged the sea in the ardour of his all-pervading search for this neighbour to whom “love” was to “work no ill.” But as man did not occupy the depths of the sea, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy contented himself with traversing, in his astonishing mental flight, all the most distant and uncivilized countries known to the geographer. And in all these far-away places, some of which the bewildered farmers of Middlebrook had never heard of before, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy had no difficulty in triumphantly finding “his neighbour”; and having thus found “his neighbour” at the uttermost ends of the earth, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy unceremoniously haled him as it were, taking him by the nape of the neck, metaphorically speaking, and holding him up for the dumbfounded farmers of Middlebrook to gaze upon. Having thus shown to the undiscriminating inhabitants of Middlebrook who their real “neighbours” were, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy proceeded to invest these “neighbours” with the garments made by the local branch of the Missionary Society, putting these garments on to these imaginary “neighbours” somewhat as a constable would clap handcuffs on to a miserable wretch who had long eluded justice. Thus, the Rev. Mr. Holworthy, to his own satisfaction, showed to his congregation that through the efforts of their local branch of the Missionary Society they were working no ill but positive good to their “neighbours” in the antipodes. He then indulged in much self-gratulatory and flowery complacence, assuring his congregation that they were sublimely proving the Apostle Paul’s great sentence that “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour.”