“Oh, his father’s going to take him to Australia as he arranged.  They sail to-morrow.  There’s one thing,” Mark added with a kind of gloomy relish.  “He’s bound to go to the bad, and perhaps that’ll be a lesson to his father.”

The hope of the Vicar of Meade Cantorum and equally it may be added the hope of Mr. Lidderdale that the affair would be kept out of the papers was not fulfilled.  The day after Mr. Pomeroy and his son sailed from Tilbury the following communication appeared in The Times: 

Sir,—­The accompanying letter was handed to me by my friend the Reverend Eustace Pomeroy to be used as I thought fit and subject to only one stipulation—­that it should not be published until he and his son were out of England.  As President of the Society for the Protection of the English Church against Romish Aggression I feel that it is my duty to lay the facts before the country.  I need scarcely add that I have been at pains to verify the surprising and alarming accusations made by a clergyman against two other clergymen, and I earnestly request the publicity of your columns for what I venture to believe is positive proof of the dangerous conspiracy existing in our very midst to romanize the Established Church of England.  I shall be happy to produce for any of your readers who find Mr. Pomeroy’s story incredible at the close of the nineteenth century the signed statements of witnesses and other documentary evidence.

     I am, Sir,

     Your obedient servant,

     Danvers.

     The Right Honble. the Lord Danvers, P.C.

     President of the Society for the Protection of the English Church
     against Romish Aggression.

     My Lord,

I have to bring to your notice as President of the S.P.E.  C.R.A. what I venture to assert is one of the most daring plots to subvert home and family life in the interests of priestcraft that has ever been discovered.  In taking this step I am fully conscious of its seriousness, and if I ask your lordship to delay taking any measures for publicity until the unhappy principal is upon the high seas in the guardianship of his even more unhappy father, I do so for the sake of the wretched boy whose future has been nearly blasted by the Jesuitical behaviour of two so-called Protestant clergymen.

Four years ago, my lord, I retired from a lifelong career as a missionary in New Guinea to give my children the advantages of English education and English climate, and it is surely hard that I should live to curse the day on which I did so.  My third son Cyril was sent to school at Haverton House, Slowbridge, to an educational establishment kept by a Mr. Henry Lidderdale, reputed to be a strong Evangelical and I believe I am justified in saying rightly so reputed.  At the same time I regret that Mr. Lidderdale, whose brother was a notorious Romanizer I have since discovered, should not have exercised more care