there resided only a few farmers higher in degree than field labourers,
brickmakers, and such like. Mr Crawley had now passed some ten years of
his life at Hogglestock; and during those years he had worked very hard
to do his duty, struggling to teach the people around him perhaps too
much of the mystery, but something of the comfort, of religion. That he
had became popular in his parish cannot be said of him. He was not a man
to make himself popular in any position. I have said that he was moody
and disappointed. He was even worse than this; he was morose, sometimes
almost to insanity. There had been days in which even his wife had found
it impossible to deal with him otherwise than as with an acknowledged
lunatic. And this was known among the farmers, who talked about their
clergyman among themselves as though he were a madman. But among the
very poor, among the brickmakers of Hoggle End--a lawless, drunken,
terribly rough lot of humanity--he was held in high respect; for they
knew that he lived hardly, as they lived; that he worked hard, as they
worked; and that the outside world was hard to him, as it was to them;
and there had been an apparent sincerity of godliness about the man, and
a manifest struggle to do his duty in spite of the world's ill-usage,
which had won its way even with the rough; so that Mr Crawley's name had
stood high with many in the parish, in spite of the unfortunate
peculiarity of his disposition. This was the man who was now accused of
stealing a cheque for twenty pounds.

But before the circumstances of the alleged theft are stated, a word or
two must be said as to Mr Crawley's family. It is declared that a good
wife is a crown to her husband, but Mrs Crawley has been much more than
a crown to him. As had regarded all the inner life of the man--all that
portion of his life which had not been passed in the pulpit or in
pastoral teaching--she had been crown, throne, and sceptre all in one.
That she had endured with him and on his behalf the miseries of poverty,