time to make a man of him."

The end of it was that he became, among other things, the sexton of
Golden Friars.

He was a punctual sexton. He meddled with no other person's business;
but he was a silent man, and by no means popular. He was reserved in
company; and he used to walk alone by the shore of the lake, while
other fellows played at fives or skittles; and when he visited the
kitchen of the George, he had his liquor to himself, and in the midst
of the general talk was a saturnine listener. There was something
sinister in this man's face; and when things went wrong with him, he
could look dangerous enough.

There were whispered stories in Golden Friars about Toby Crooke.
Nobody could say how they got there. Nothing is more mysterious than
the spread of rumour. It is like a vial poured on the air. It travels,
like an epidemic, on the sightless currents of the atmosphere, or by
the laws of a telluric influence equally intangible. These stories
treated, though darkly, of the long period of his absence from his
native village; but they took no well-defined shape, and no one could
refer them to any authentic source.

The Vicar's charity was of the kind that thinketh no evil; and in such
cases he always insisted on proof. Crooke was, of course, undisturbed
in his office.

On the evening before the tragedy came to light--trifles are always
remembered after the catastrophe--a boy, returning along the margin of
the mere, passed him by seated on a prostrate trunk of a tree, under