return to the only safe fold of Mother Church (extra quam nulla salus),
by no means compelled them to disgorge the wealth of which they had
plundered that only hope of their salvation. Most of them, however, like
poor Tom Leigh, felt the abbey rents burn in their purses; and, as John
Bull generally does in a difficulty, compromised the matter by a second
folly (as if two wrong things made one right one), and petted foreign
priests, and listened, or pretended not to listen, to their plottings
and their practisings; and gave up a son here, and a son there, as a
sort of a sin-offering and scapegoat, to be carried off to Douay, or
Rheims, or Rome, and trained as a seminary priest; in plain English, to
be taught the science of villainy, on the motive of superstition. One of
such hapless scapegoats, and children who had been cast into the fire to
Moloch, was Eustace Leigh, whom his father had sent, giving the fruit of
his body for the sin of his soul, to be made a liar of at Rheims.

And a very fair liar he had become. Not that the lad was a bad fellow at
heart; but he had been chosen by the harpies at home, on account of his
"peculiar vocation;" in plain English, because the wily priests had seen
in him certain capacities of vague hysterical fear of the unseen (the
religious sentiment, we call it now-a-days), and with them that tendency
to be a rogue, which superstitious men always have. He was now a tall,
handsome, light-complexioned man, with a huge upright forehead, a very
small mouth, and a dry and set expression of face, which was always
trying to get free, or rather to seem free, and indulge in smiles and
dimples which were proper; for one ought to have Christian love, and
if one had love one ought to be cheerful, and when people were cheerful
they smiled; and therefore he would smile, and tried to do so; but his
charity prepense looked no more alluring than malice prepense would have
done; and, had he not been really a handsome fellow, many a woman who
raved about his sweetness would have likened his frankness to that of a