abundance had been succeeded by the demon that
follows in their trains, Apoplexy—a scene of
confusion and distress—hurrying for doctors,
who came only to use lancets and shake their
heads—and the curtain fell, leaving a widow
to mourn, a preferment to delight some long
expectant, and a curate out of place. This
fatal termination of his old patron's career
came at a critical moment. Wiltshire no
longer beckoned our humble hero back. St.
George's-in-the-East had him in its clutches,
and the one hundred and fifty pounds a year,
and a field for usefulness, was better than
throwing himself adrift upon the world; and
the upshot was that, instead of leaving his
small lodging at the end of the month, he
lived there for many years.

And how were these years passed? The
work of the place—the clerical work—was
amply sufficient to fill up his time, but the
curate had desires, and felt he had a duty
beyond that routine, laborious though it
might be. The rector, true to his creed,
would hear nothing about schools, or societies.
There was the one charity school when he came
to the living, and there should be the one
charity school only, when he left it, and all the
curate's thoughts and plans had to be kept to
himself. But still he went on trying, and
kept steadily on, making himself acquainted
with the needs of the neighbourhood; visiting
the sick, advising the idle and the improvident,
and comforting the afflicted, till the people
round about began to find that " a parson"
might be a very comfortable person to know,
if, as they said, he was "one of the right
sort."

Years rolled on, and the day arrived when
the Bishop of the diocese made a grand
appeal to the public for help in the building
of new churches; and so readily was the
request responded to, that a sum of two
hundred thousand pounds accumulated in the
hands of the bankers to the fund. The
impossibility of one rector—supposing him to be
an active man, and not, as our rector was, a
kind of ' clerical sleeping-partner,' with one
curate (though a curate of treble curate power)
—ever grasping the spiritual needs of such a
parish as St. George's-in-the-East, with its
forty thousand inhabitants, must long have
struck the church reformers of London;
and when our friend the one curate made
up his mind to write to the Bishop, pointing
out certain strong reasons why a
portion of the two hundred thousand pounds
should be spent in his part of the world, the
letter could scarcely fail to receive attention.
In due tune, an answer came from the
episcopal dispenser of the building fund, stating
that a grant was in abeyance for the building
of a church in the most neglected part of the
parish, but there was a difficulty in obtaining
a site. This was hint enough. To work
went our curate, to try what could be done.
A failure on one spot only set him on to
search for another, and at length he was

directed to a small street, from the back
windows of which, it was said, a large unused
stone-yard could be seen. It had been for
years shut up behind small, poverty-stricken
tenements, that few people knew of its
existence; but there it was, sure enough,
grown over by weeds, and strewed with the
dirt and refuse that poverty, and London cats,
and London smoke, somehow bring together
whenever a spot remains unoccupied. Scraps
of stone were scattered about it—fragments
too small, or too ugly for door-steps or tomb-
stones, yet too heavy for trespassing boys to
throw at one another, or to toss through the
windows of the neighbouring empty houses,
and of no value per pound at the marine
store dealers'. And there they lay, uncared-
for for years, until the eye of the curate fell
upon the spot, and straightway they reared
themselves, in his mental vision, one upon
another, into a tall church filled with wor-
shippers, with the curate himself ministering
there. But dreaming was no use. The
curate went forth to try what he could do.
Work, work, work; talk, talk, talk, to one
and to another; letters here, explanations
there, until, at length, the site was secured;
until the building was begun, continued, and
furnished. The chosen plan was one that
would secure the largest amount of
accommodation for the sum to be spent; and the
day arrived when church-room was ready for
sixteen hundred people, within a substantial
building, in a district set apart for it, and
christened " Christ Church." But still, there
were no fittings; no stoves; no organ; no
preacher's house; no preacher's pay; no
preacher.

The curate who had worked so long and
so satisfactorily in the parish, was naturally
the man who should occupy the church he
had contributed to rear; but having by this
time been the sole working clergyman of the
mother church for twelve years, and having
still only his one hundred and fifty pounds
a-year to rely upon, he hesitated to give
up that. Nobody was willing to take the
empty church—the bare walls—the shell—
without even an income sufficient to feed
the legendary mice supposed to be a part of
every parish. Still, after a while, he thought
he'd try.

The terms he made with the old rector
were (and the said old rector had very, very
serious doubts about all these new-fangled
church-buildings; but being quite an old
gentleman, he thought it very much the
bishop's affair)—the curate's terms, we say,
were that he would accept the incumbency of
the new district upon condition of continuing
to receive his stipend, out of which he would
pay a curate to perform duty at the old
church, whilst he himself went to labour with
the new.

He began his labours in a very business-
like way. He took stock of his new
district, counted his flock, estimated their