and besides these trifling duties have a good deal to do with their
fruit and vegetable garden, and everything to do with their poultry.
This being so, is it not pathetic to find a young woman bravely
struggling to learn languages and keep up with her husband?
If I were that husband, those puddings would taste sweetest to me
that were served with Latin sauce. They are both severely pious,
and are for ever engaged in desperate efforts to practise what
they preach; than which, as we all know, nothing is more difficult.
He works in his parish with the most noble self-devotion, and
never loses courage, although his efforts have been several times
rewarded by disgusting libels pasted up on the street-corners,
thrown under doors, and even fastened to his own garden wall.
The peasant hereabouts is past belief low and animal, and a sensitive,
intellectual parson among them is really a pearl before swine.
For years he has gone on unflinchingly, filled with the most living
faith and hope and charity, and I sometimes wonder whether they are
any better now in his parish than they were under his predecessor,
a man who smoked and drank beer from Monday morning to Saturday night,
never did a stroke of work, and often kept the scanty congregation
waiting on Sunday afternoons while he finished his postprandial nap.
It is discouraging enough to make most men give in, and leave
the parish to get to heaven or not as it pleases; but he never
seems discouraged, and goes on sacrificing the best part
of his life to these people when all his tastes are literary,
and all his inclinations towards the life of the student.
His convictions drag him out of his little home at all hours to
minister to the sick and exhort the wicked; they give him no rest,
and never let him feel he has done enough; and when he comes home weary,
after a day's wrestling with his parishioners' souls, he is confronted
on his doorstep by filthy abuse pasted up on his own front door.