voluntarily gave up sixty-two pounds eleven shillings and fourpence a year to his twelve old neighbours;—he who, for the money, does his precentor's work as no precentor has done it before, since Barchester Cathedral was built;—such an idea has never sullied his quiet, or disturbed his conscience.
Nevertheless, Mr. Harding is becoming uneasy at the rumour which he knows to prevail in Barchester on the subject. He is aware that, at any rate, two of his old men have been heard to say, that if every one had his own, they might each have their hundred pounds a year, and live like gentlemen, instead of a beggarly one shilling and sixpence a day; and that they had slender cause to be thankful for a miserable dole of twopence, when Mr. Harding and Mr. Chadwick, between them, ran away with thousands of pounds which good old John Hiram never intended for the like of them. It is the ingratitude of this which stings Mr. Harding. One of this discontented pair, Abel Handy, was put into the hospital by himself; he had been a stonemason in Barchester, and had broken his thigh by a fall from a scaffolding, while employed about the cathedral; and Mr. Harding had given him the first vacancy in the hospital after the occurrence, although Dr. Grantly had been very anxious to put into it an insufferable clerk of his at Plumstead Episcopi, who had lost all his teeth, and whom the archdeacon hardly knew how to get rid of by other means. Dr. Grantly has not forgotten to remind Mr. Harding how well satisfied with his one and sixpence a day old Joe Mutters would have been, and how injudicious it was on the part of Mr. Harding to allow a radical from the town to get into the concern. Probably Dr. Grantly forgot, at the moment, that the charity was intended for broken-down journeymen of Barchester.
There is living at Barchester, a young man, a surgeon, named John Bold, and both Mr. Harding and Dr. Grantly are
