welcome him two and three times in the week.
Wonderful tricks are played with Polentas.
Bewildering effects result from so simple an
element as — cheese ! It turns up unexpectedly in
soup ; it mystifies— though familiar enough in
such a situation — on the surface of maccaroni.

I do not think those Lilliputian birds— one of
which fits on the top of a fork, and may be
gauged nicely as an exact mouthful — undeserving
of praise or respect. I remark the British
mind regards them with disfavour, if not with
suspicion. Enthusiastic sportsmen purveying
for Roman markets, it is darkly whispered, do
not too nicely discriminate, and bring home
their bags distended with a loose miscellany of
robins, sparrows, wrens, and such twittering
fry. Stripped of their plumage, 'tis a nice eye
that shall distinguish accurately. What boots
it, so long as these doubtful birds have a kind
of genuine game flavour, and crunch musically
between the jaws. Away with these jealous
probing natures that must know the mystery of
what they eat — God help them !— and have in the
Lancet (the journal of that name) and Doctor
Hassall to gauge every preparation set before
them. I tremble for the appalling discoveries.
Better skim away lightly over the thin ice, and
not know that it is marked dangerous, else this
might have been the sword the late Damocles,
Esq., had swinging over his head.

THE WOLF AT THE CHURCH DOOR.

THE Archbishop of Canterbury himself has
publicly said that ten thousand of the twenty
thousand clergy of England and Wales are not
in the receipt of a hundred a year each. We
have a bishop's word for it, that a bishop without
private fortune in a bishopric that yields him
only five thousand a year " must be a needy man."
He knows the struggles of poor brethren in his
diocese, and whatever remains from his other
charities is spent in saving them from ruin. Take
an obverse of that medal: an Ecclesiastical
Commission redistributing surplus revenues of the
Church, recently doubled the thousand a year
of a dean who had been appointed to his office,
because he possessed a private fortune that made
the income of the deanery a matter of no
consequence whatever to him. The same
Commission, in its early days, spent nearly a hundred
and fifty thousand pounds upon the houses of
eight bishops. In every way to him who hath
it gives. When it adds to the endowment of
poor livings, it gives only its hundreds against
equal hundreds raised in the parish of the starving
clergyman. A parish, whether in town or
country, may be populous and poor; if so, let
its pastor be a beggar. That appears to be the
motto of the Church Commissioners.

The clergymen of the English Church, from
the archbishop down to the hungriest of super-
annuated curates, are in our day a body of
Christian gentlemen as hardworking, and in the
main as self-denying, as the world can show.
The privations and sorrows of the most devoted
Greenland missionary are more than equalled by
many a pale, fatherly man in rusty black, who
works his life out as an underpaid clergyman in
a rich English town, or in a pleasant village
among our home corn-fields, claiming as a scholar
and a gentleman the respect of all his parishioners,
and hiding from all eyes the meals of tea and dry
bread upon which he and his wife and children
are subsisting. When the terrible truth peeps
out from under any of its coverings, hands are
outstretched in well-meant effort to conceal what
it is thought might, were it fully known, bring
scandal on the Church. The secret has been
nobly respected, at cost of their lives, by a
thousand sufferers. What it might be their shame
to tell aloud — the shame of the Church of which
they are true and loyal members— it is their
honour to have said of them by others. A full
knowledge of the truth would rather help to
bind the striving million to the Church, than
to bring disrespect upon it. Moreover, the
grief must be published. A private man in
difficulties has no chance of fair recovery till
he has found courage to confess and face his
difficulties boldly. Means are now being
furnished to the public for a clear sense of what
the words import, when it is said on the highest
Church authority, that half the clergy of the
Church of England have incomes below one
hundred a year.

Four years ago there was formed, under the
patronage of the late Bishop of Rochester, a
"Clerical Fund and Poor Clergy Relief Society,"
for the purpose of furnishing private aid to poor
clergymen in support of life insurance, and for
the relief of what we must needs call destitution
with small grants of money, and — pitiful to add
—with sheets, blankets, and warm clothing. The
secretary to this society, whose offices are at
345, Strand, is the Rev. W. G. Jervis. This
gentleman has been unable to endure in silence
the incessant revelations of distress that are
addressed to him, and, of course reserving all
names of places or persons, has published in a
small pamphlet of what he may well call " Startling
Facts," a part of what he has thus learnt.
From that pamphlet, and from the society's
report for the year now drawing to a close, we
take information that will help to remove
discussion of the question of small livings in the
Church from the domain of vague generalities,
and make men active in the search for remedy
of what is now a most intolerable evil. When
a vicar who has done his work in the church for
forty years, and creditably brought up seven sons,
finds all the toil of his life rewarded in this world
with an income of little more than fifty pounds
a year, while a clerk not in holy orders, but in
government or mercantile employment, would
have risen to a living of six or eight hundred by
the same long course of duty done; when a
clergyman keeping a wife and eight children on
sixty pounds a year, has only seventeenpence in
the house wherewith to meet the expenses of a
ninth child at its birth; when a clergyman
unmarried, helps and tends the poor in a wide
rural parish, is their doctor as well as their