’I’m afraid your feet are very wet, dear.  What a terrible morning!  Let me take your hat.  Your slippers are at the fire.’

Mr. Barton was feeling a little cold and cross.  It is difficult, when you have been doing disagreeable duties, without praise, on a snowy day, to attend to the very minor morals.  So he showed no recognition of Milly’s attentions, but simply said, ‘Fetch me my dressing-gown, will you?’

’It is down, dear.  I thought you wouldn’t go into the study, because you said you would letter and number the books for the Lending Library.  Patty and I have been covering them, and they are all ready in the sitting-room.’

‘Oh, I can’t do those this morning,’ said Mr. Barton, as he took off his boots and put his feet into the slippers Milly had brought him; ’you must put them away into the parlour.’

The sitting-room was also the day nursery and schoolroom; and while Mamma’s back was turned, Dickey, the second boy, had insisted on superseding Chubby in the guidance of a headless horse, of the red-wafered species, which she was drawing round the room, so that when Papa opened the door Chubby was giving tongue energetically.

‘Milly, some of these children must go away.  I want to be quiet.’

’Yes, dear.  Hush, Chubby; go with Patty, and see what Nanny is getting for our dinner.  Now, Fred and Sophy and Dickey, help me to carry these books into the parlour.  There are three for Dickey.  Carry them steadily.’

Papa meanwhile settled himself in his easy-chair, and took up a work on Episcopacy, which he had from the Clerical Book Society; thinking he would finish it and return it this afternoon, as he was going to the Clerical Meeting at Milby Vicarage, where the Book Society had its headquarters.

The Clerical Meetings and Book Society, which had been founded some eight or ten months, had had a noticeable effect on the Rev. Amos Barton.  When he first came to Shepperton he was simply an evangelical clergyman, whose Christian experiences had commenced under the teaching of the Rev. Mr. Johns, of Gun Street Chapel, and had been consolidated at Cambridge under the influence of Mr. Simeon.  John Newton and Thomas Scott were his doctrinal ideals; he would have taken in the “Christian Observer” and the “Record,” if he could have afforded it; his anecdotes were chiefly of the pious-jocose kind, current in dissenting circles; and he thought an Episcopalian Establishment unobjectionable.

But by this time the effect of the Tractarian agitation was beginning to be felt in backward provincial regions, and the Tractarian satire on the Low-Church party was beginning to tell even on those who disavowed or resisted Tractarian doctrines.  The vibration of an intellectual movement was felt from the golden head to the miry toes of the Establishment; and so it came to pass that, in the district round Milby, the market-town close to Shepperton, the clergy had agreed to have a clerical meeting every month, wherein they would exercise their intellects by discussing theological and ecclesiastical questions, and cement their brotherly love by discussing a good dinner.  A Book Society naturally suggested itself as an adjunct of this agreeable plan; and thus, you perceive, there was provision made for ample friction of the clerical mind.