My other friend, Bickley, was a person of a quite different character.  Like Bastin, he was learned, but his tendencies faced another way.  If Bastin’s omnivorous throat could swallow a camel, especially a theological camel, Bickley’s would strain at the smallest gnat, especially a theological gnat.  The very best and most upright of men, yet he believed in nothing that he could not taste, see or handle.  He was convinced, for instance, that man is a brute-descended accident and no more, that what we call the soul or the mind is produced by a certain action of the grey matter of the brain; that everything apparently inexplicable has a perfectly mundane explanation, if only one could find it; that miracles certainly never did happen, and never will; that all religions are the fruit of human hopes and fears and the most convincing proof of human weakness; that notwithstanding our infinite variations we are the subjects of Nature’s single law and the victims of blind, black and brutal chance.

Such was Bickley with his clever, well-cut face that always reminded me of a cameo, and thoughtful brow; his strong, capable hands and his rather steely mouth, the mere set of which suggested controversy of an uncompromising kind.  Naturally as the Church had claimed Bastin, so medicine claimed Bickley.

Now as it happened the man who succeeded my father as vicar of Fulcombe was given a better living and went away shortly after I had purchased the place and with it the advowson.  Just at this time also I received a letter written in the large, sprawling hand of Bastin from whom I had not heard for years.  It went straight to the point, saying that he, Bastin, had seen in a Church paper that the last incumbent had resigned the living of Fulcombe which was in my gift.  He would therefore be obliged if I would give it to him as the place he was at in Yorkshire did not suit his wife’s health.

Here I may state that afterwards I learned that what did not suit Mrs. Bastin was the organist, who was pretty.  She was by nature a woman with a temperament so insanely jealous that actually she managed to be suspicious of Bastin, whom she had captured in an unguarded moment when he was thinking of something else and who would as soon have thought of even looking at any woman as he would of worshipping Baal.  As a matter of fact it took him months to know one female from another.  Except as possible providers of subscriptions and props of Mothers’ Meetings, women had no interest for him.

To return—­with that engaging honesty which I have mentioned—­ Bastin’s letter went on to set out all his own disabilities, which, he added, would probably render him unsuitable for the place he desired to fill.  He was a High Churchman, a fact which would certainly offend many; he had no claims to being a preacher although he was extraordinarily well acquainted with the writings of the Early Fathers. (What on earth had that to do with the question, I wondered.) On the other hand he had generally been considered a good visitor and was fond of walking (he meant to call on distant parishioners, but did not say so).