"I am sure it is large enough for any one under a bishop. Besides, I
don't think he is fussy about anything except his dinner."

"It is not the way he is accustomed to be treated when he is on a visit,
I can assure you. He is a person who is generally considered a great
deal."

"Well, I consider him a great deal. I consider him one of the finest old
heathen I ever knew."

Fortunately for their domestic peace, Lady Atherley usually misses the
points of her husband's speeches, but there are some which jar upon her
sense of the becoming, and this was one of them.

"I don't think," she observed to me, the offender himself having
escaped, "that even if Uncle Augustus were not my uncle, a heathen is a
proper name to call a clergyman, especially a canon--and one who is so
looked up to in the Church. Have you ever heard him preach? But you must
have heard about him, and about his sermons? I thought so. They are
beautiful. When he preaches the church is crammed, and with the best
people--in the season, when they are in town. And he has written a great
many religious books too--sermons and hymns and manuals. There is a
little book in red morocco you may have seen in my sitting-room--I know
it was there a week ago--which he gave me, _The Life of Prayer_, with a
short meditation and a hymn for every hour of the day--all composed by
him. We don't see so much of him as I could wish. He is so grieved about
George's views. He gave him some of his own sermons, but of course
George would not look at them; and--so annoying--the last time he came I
put the sermons, two beautiful large volumes of them, on the