Mr. Ephraim Shine volunteered for this duty.  Ephraim was a tall gaunt man, with hollow cheeks, a leathery complexion, and large feet.  He walked or sat with his eyes continually fixed upon these feet—­reproachfully, it seemed—­as if their disproportion were a source of perennial woe; he carried his arms looped behind him, and had acquired a peculiar stoop—­to facilitate his vigilant guardianship of his feet, apparently.  Mr. Shine, as superintendent of the Waddy Wesleyan Chapel, represented a party that had long since broken away from the School Committee, which was condemned in prayer as licentious and ungodly, and left to its wickedness when it exhibited a determination to stand by Joel Ham, a scoffer and a drinker of strong drinks, as against a respectable, if comparatively unlettered, nominee of the Chapel and the Band of Hope.  His presence at the committee meeting to-night was noted with surprise, although it excited no remark; and his offer to interview the widow was accepted with gratitude as a patriotic proposal.  There was only one dissentient—­Rogers, a burly faceman from the Silver Stream.

‘Don’t send Shine to cant an’ snuffle, an’ preach the poor woman into a fit o’ the miserables,’ he said.

Ephraim lifted his patient eyes to Rogers’s face for a moment with an expression of meek reproof, then let them slide back to his boots again, but answered nothing.  The enmity of the two was well known in Waddy.  Rogers was a worldly man who drank and swore, and who loved a fight as other men loved a good meal; and Shine, as the superintendent, must withhold his countenance from so grievous a sinner.  Besides, there was a belief that at some time or another the faceman had thrashed Shine, who was searcher at the Stream in his week-day capacity, and for that reason was despised by the miners, and regarded as a creature apart.  Ephraim, it was remarked, was always particularly careful in searching Rogers when he came off shift, in the hope, as the men believed, of one day finding a secreted nugget, and getting even with his enemy by gaoling him for a few years.

As Ephraim passed out from the bar he again allowed his eyes to roll up and meet those of his enemy from the dark shadow of his thick brows.

’Don’t forget the little widow was sweet on Frank Hardy before you jugged him, Tinribs,’ said the miner.

Tinribs was a name bestowed upon the superintendent by the youth of Waddy, and called after him by irreverent small boys from convenient cover or under the shelter of darkness.  He found the Widow Haddon at home.  She it was who answered his knock.

‘I have come from the School Committee, ma’am,’ he said, still intent upon his boots.

‘About Dickie, is it?  Come in.’

Mrs. Haddon was dressmaker-in-ordinary to the township, and her otherwise carefully tended kitchen was littered with clippings and bits of material.  She resumed her task by the lamp a soon as the delegate of the School Committee was comfortably seated.