140 Sportsmen Parsons in Peace and War 



in the East for some years, I confess I do not cherish a very deep 

 love for the missionary ; but I dare say that is only because I 

 have not been fortunate in those I have met, and my untutored 

 mind fails to grasp their virtues. I remember being chided by 

 an old General who sat next me at dinner in Simla years ago, 

 because I said I did not admire missionaries. In his view, he 

 said, they performed most valuable service to the state by 

 occasionally getting eaten, thereby providing most excellent 

 training for young officers who accompanied the punitive ex- 

 peditions sent out to avenge them ; but at that time there was 

 not enough fighting to go round, and I am sure the General 

 would change his view if he were alive to-day. 



Mr. Aldridge came home intending to return and work with 

 the missionaries as a layman, but was persuaded to take Orders 

 and stay in England to take up work in the crowded slums of 

 Leeds. No change could have been more complete. After 

 years of sport and adventure in the East, with few of his own 

 race about him, and those few all cheery sportsmen, he found 

 himself planted in the midst of the crowded squalor of an 

 industrial slum. I doubt very much if he had seen anything in 

 the wilds worse than the grim misery our civilisation can show, 

 or if any number of missionaries could ever enable the heathen 

 Chinee to appreciate what he had missed. In these new 

 surroundings he even felt obliged to refuse pheasant-shooting 

 invitations for fear he should offend the susceptibilities of his 

 Leeds vicar ; yet how he must have longed for an occasional 

 day among trees and open country to remind him of the old 

 free life, after weeks and months in the choking gloom of the 

 slums ! 



The call of the wild gradually grew on him — it would have 

 been amazing had it not — and he began to feel like a caged 

 bird. He took to running — ^quite an exciting sport in the 

 crowded streets of a city — and it earned him the title of the 

 " running parson," but helped to keep him alive. 



The shackles of conventional city life grew always more 

 intolerable, and at last he obtained a country living, and some- 

 thing of the old sense of freedom returned so that the call of the 

 East grew fainter and less insistent ; but it is in his heart to this 

 day, and still occasionally raises its small voice. 



At his new home Hannington, in Hampshire, he naturally 



