THE RESIDENTS 95 



The parishioners who attend the church have no reason 

 to complain of their parson. He is exemplary in both his 

 private and his official relations ; and if his lines have 

 fallen to him in pleasant places, and if his nest in the 

 vicarage is tolerably well feathered, so much the better 

 for the members of his flock. There is little destitu- 

 tion in Oakenhurst. There is an imposing pile of 

 cottage almshouses, and the panels of the front of the 

 gallery in the church are emblazoned with inscriptions 

 recording the charitable disposition of crumbs of their 

 property by men who had quite done with it, and 

 whose dust is mouldering in the churchyard. How 

 Walter Fakenham, gentleman, bequeathed the sum of 

 ^300, 3 per cent consols, in perpetuity ; the yearly 

 proceeds to be devoted to supplementing the sustenance 

 of six impoverished widows of fair fame the selection 

 of the said widows to be at the discretion of the vicar 

 and the churchwardens for the time being, &c., &c. Still, 

 the poor in England will be always with one, whatever 

 the charitable funds they have to draw upon ; and this 

 the good vicar and his lady are never suffered to 

 forget. Every evening in the winter, and more or less 

 all the year round, there is a larger or smaller levfa of 

 applicants assembled at his kitchen door. In the hard 

 frosts, when the labourers are frozen out, the scene in 

 the stable yard reminds one of the courts of the old 

 convents in Rome or Naples, before the Italian rookeries 

 had been swept away by the stern edicts of a latitu- 

 dinarian Parliament. The vicar goes about in all 

 weather almost as indefatigably as the parish doctors, 



