He laid the foundation-stone in June 1813, and took possession of the completed edifice in March 1814.  “My house was considered the ugliest in the county, but all admitted that it was one of the most comfortable."[68] It remains to the present day pretty much as Sydney Smith left it.  A room on the ground-floor, next to the drawing-room, served the threefold purposes of study, dispensary, and justice-room.  As a rule, he wrote his sermons and his articles for the Edinburgh in the drawing-room, not heeding the conversation of family and visitors; but in the “study” he dosed his parishioners; and here, having been made a Justice of the Peace, he administered mercy to poachers.  He hated the Game-Laws as they stood, and it stirred his honest wrath to reflect that “for every ten pheasants which fluttered in the wood, one English peasant was rotting in gaol.”  So strong was his belief in the contaminating effects of a prisoner’s life that he never, if he could help it, would commit a boy or girl to gaol.  He sought permission to accompany Mrs. Fry on one of her visits to Newgate, and spoke of her ministry there as “the most solemn, the most Christian, the most affecting, which any human eye ever witnessed."[69] A pleasing trait of his incumbency at Foston was the creation of allotment-gardens for the poor.  He divided several acres of the glebe into sixteenths, and let them, at a low rent, to the villagers.  Each allotment was just big enough to supply a cottage with potatoes, and to support a pig.  Cheap food for the poor was another of his excellent hobbies.  His Common-Place Book contains receipts for nourishing soups made of rice and peas and flavoured with ox-cheek.  He notes that more than thirty people were comfortably fed with these concoctions at a penny a head.  After a bad harvest he and his family lived, like the labourers round them, on unleavened cakes made from the damaged flour of the sprouted wheat.  His daughter writes—­“The luxury of returning to bread again can hardly be imagined by those who have never been deprived of it.”

But, in spite of occasional difficulties of this description, which were always faced and overcome with invincible good-humour, Sydney Smith’s fifteen years at Foston were happily and profitably spent.  He was in the fulness of his physical and intellectual vigour.  He said of himself, “I am a rough writer of Sermons,” but his energy in delivering them awoke the admiration of his sturdy flock.—­

“When I began to thump the cushion of my pulpit, on first coming to Foston, as is my wont when I preach, the accumulated dust of a hundred and fifty years made such a cloud, that for some minutes I lost sight of my congregation."[70]

His Bible-class for boys was affectionately remembered sixty years afterwards.[71] By his constant contributions to the Edinburgh, he was both helping forward the great causes in which he most earnestly believed, and establishing his own fame.  Good health, cheerfulness, and contentment reigned in the Rectory, which might well have been called “A Temple of Industrious Peace."[72]