afford them, now?'

'What a question for the endowed and established to put to a poor
starving devil of a curate like me!' said Berkeley lightly. 'You,
an incarnate sinecure and vested interest, a creature revelling in
an unearned income of fabulous Oriental magnificence--I dare say,
putting one thing with another, fully as much as five hundred a
year--to ask me, the unbeneficed and insignificant, with my wretched
pittance of eighty pounds per annum and my three pass-men a term
for classical mods, how I scrape together the few miserable, hoarded
ha'pence which I grudgingly invest in my pots and pipkins! I save
them from my dinner, Mr. Bursar--I save them. If the Church only
recognised modest merit as it ought to do!--if the bishops only
listened with due attention to the sound and scholarly exegesis of
my Sunday evening discourses at St. Fredegond's!--then, indeed, I
might be disposed to regard things through a more satisfied medium
--the medium of a nice, fat, juicy country living. But for you,
Le Breton--you, sir, a pluralist and a sanguisorb of the deepest
dye--to reproach me with my Franciscan poverty--oh, it's too
cruel!'

'I'm an abuse, I know,' Herbert answered, smiling and waving his
hand gracefully. 'I at once admit it. Abuses exist, unhappily; and
while they continue do so, isn't it better they should envisage
themselves as me than as some other and probably less deserving
fellow?'

'No, it's not, decidedly. I should much prefer that one of them
envisaged itself as me.'