Breakfast over, Mr. Barton mounted to his study, and occupied himself in the first place with his letter to Mr. Oldinport.  It was very much the same sort of letter as most clergymen would have written under the same circumstances, except that instead of perambulate, the Rev. Amos wrote preambulate, and instead of ‘if haply’, ‘if happily’, the contingency indicated being the reverse of happy.  Mr. Barton had not the gift of perfect accuracy in English orthography and syntax, which was unfortunate, as he was known not to be a Hebrew scholar, and not in the least suspected of being an accomplished Grecian.  These lapses, in a man who had gone through the Eleusinian mysteries of a university education, surprised the young ladies of his parish extremely; especially the Misses Farquhar, whom he had once addressed in a letter as Dear Mads., apparently an abbreviation for Madams.  The persons least surprised at the Rev. Amos’s deficiencies were his clerical brethren, who had gone through the mysteries themselves.

At eleven o’clock, Mr. Barton walked forth in cape and boa, with the sleet driving in his face, to read prayers at the workhouse, euphemistically called the ‘College’.  The College was a huge square stone building, standing on the best apology for an elevation of ground that could be seen for about ten miles around Shepperton.  A flat ugly district this; depressing enough to look at even on the brightest days.  The roads are black with coal-dust, the brick houses dingy with smoke; and at that time—­the time of handloom weavers—­every other cottage had a loom at its window, where you might see a pale, sickly-looking man or woman pressing a narrow chest against a board, and doing a sort of treadmill work with legs and arms.  A troublesome district for a clergyman; at least to one who, like Amos Barton, understood the ‘cure of souls’ in something more than an official sense; for over and above the rustic stupidity furnished by the farm-labourers, the miners brought obstreperous animalism, and the weavers in an acrid Radicalism and Dissent.  Indeed, Mrs. Hackit often observed that the colliers, who many of them earned better wages than Mr. Barton, ’passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and smoking, like the beasts that perish’ (speaking, we may presume, in a remotely analogical sense); and in some of the alehouse corners the drink was flavoured by a dingy kind of infidelity, something like rinsings of Tom Paine in ditch-water.  A certain amount of religious excitement created by the popular preaching of Mr. Parry, Amos’s predecessor, had nearly died out, and the religious life of Shepperton was falling back towards low-water mark.  Here, you perceive, was a terrible stronghold of Satan; and you may well pity the Rev. Amos Barton, who had to stand single-handed and summon it to surrender.  We read, indeed, that the walls of Jericho fell down before the sound of trumpets; but we nowhere hear that those trumpets were hoarse and feeble.  Doubtless