“Would God that you were one! for you would make a right good one.”

“Humph! at least you see what you can do, if you’ll only face fact as it stands, and talk about the realities of life.  I’ll puff your sermon beforehand, I assure you, and bring all I can to hear it.”

So Frank preached a noble sermon, most rational, and most spiritual withal; but he, too, like his tutor, took little by his motion.

All the present fruit upon which he had to congratulate himself was, that the Brianite preacher denounced him in chapel next Sunday as a German Rationalist, who impiously pretended to explain away the Lord’s visitation into a carnal matter of drains, and pipes, and gases, and such like; and that his rival of another denomination, who was a fanatic on the teetotal question, denounced him as bitterly for supporting the cause of drunkenness, by attributing cholera to want of cleanliness, while all rational people knew that its true source was intemperance.  Poor Frank! he had preached against drunkenness many a time and oft:  but because he would not add a Mohammedan eleventh commandment to those ten which men already find difficulty enough in keeping, he was set upon at once by a fanatic whose game it was—­as it is that of too many—­to snub sanitary reform, and hinder the spread of plain scientific truth, for the sake of pushing their own nostrum for all human ills.

In despair, Tom went off to Elsley Vavasour.  Would he help?  Would he join, as one of two householders, in making a representation to the proper authorities?

Elsley had never mixed in local matters:  and if he had, he knew nothing of how to manage men, or to read an Act of Parliament; so, angry as Tom was inclined to be with him, he found it useless to quarrel with a man so utterly unpractical, who would, probably, had he been stirred into exertion, have done more harm than good.

“Only come with me, and satisfy yourself as to the existence of one of these nuisances, and then you will have grounds on which to go,” said Tom, who had still hopes of making a cat’s-paw of Elsley, and by his power over him, pulling the strings from behind.

Sorely against his will, Elsley went, saw, and smelt; came home again; was very unwell; and was visited nightly for a week after that by that most disgusting of all phantoms, sanitary nightmare; which some who have worked in the foul places of the earth know but too well.  Evidently his health could not stand it.  There was no work to be got out of him in that direction.

“Would he write, then, and represent matters to Lord Scoutbush?”

How could he?  He did not know the man; not a line had ever been exchanged between them.  Their relations were so very peculiar.  It would seem sheer impertinence on his part to interfere with the management of Lord Scoutbush’s property.  Really there was a great deal to be said, Tom felt, for poor Elsley’s dislike of meddling in that quarter.