This resolution brought me some relief, but still I was depressed.  It was depressing weather.—­I may as well say that I was not married then, and that I firmly believed I never should be married—­not from any ambition taking the form of self-denial; nor yet from any notion that God takes pleasure in being a hard master; but there was a lady—­Well, I will be honest, as I would be.—­I had been refused a few months before, which I think was the best thing ever happened to me except one.  That one, of course, was when I was accepted.  But this is not much to the purpose now.  Only it was depressing weather.

For is it not depressing when the rain is falling, and the steam of it is rising? when the river is crawling along muddily, and the horses stand stock-still in the meadows with their spines in a straight line from the ears to where they fail utterly in the tails?  I should only put on goloshes now, and think of the days when I despised damp.  Ah! it was mental waterproof that I needed then; for let me despise damp as much as I would, I could neither keep it out of my mind, nor help suffering the spiritual rheumatism which it occasioned.  Now, the damp never gets farther than my goloshes and my Macintosh.  And for that worst kind of rheumatism—­I never feel it now.

But I had begun to tell you about that first evening.—­I had arrived at the vicarage the night before, and it had rained all day, and was still raining, though not so much.  I took my umbrella and went out.

For as I wanted to do my work well (everything taking far more the shape of work to me, then, and duty, than it does now—­though, even now, I must confess things have occasionally to be done by the clergyman because there is no one else to do them, and hardly from other motive than a sense of duty,—­a man not being able to shirk work because it may happen to be dirty)—­I say, as I wanted to do my work well, or rather, perhaps, because I dreaded drudgery as much as any poor fellow who comes to the treadmill in consequence—­I wanted to interest myself in it; and therefore I would go and fall in love, first of all, if I could, with the country round about.  And my first step beyond my own gate was up to the ankles, in mud.

Therewith, curiously enough, arose the distracting thought how I could possibly preach two good sermons a Sunday to the same people, when one of the sermons was in the afternoon instead of the evening, to which latter I had been accustomed in the large town in which I had formerly officiated as curate in a proprietary chapel.  I, who had declaimed indignantly against excitement from without, who had been inclined to exalt the intellect at the expense even of the heart, began to fear that there must be something in the darkness, and the gas-lights, and the crowd of faces, to account for a man’s being able to preach a better sermon, and for servant girls preferring to go out in the evening.  Alas!  I had now to preach, as I might judge with all probability