You know it is my opinion, and always has been, that Carson deliberately set you against the boy; that he was always telling you tales to his disadvantage; and although I admit that the lad was very wrong to knock him down when he struck him, I think, my dear, I should have done the same had I been in his place." "Then, madam," Mr.Anthony said solemnly, "you would have deserved what happened to him--that you should be turned neck and crop into the street." Mrs.Anthony gave a determined nod of her head--a nod which signified that she should have a voice on that point.

However, seeing that in her husband's present mood it was better to say no more, she resumed her work.
While this conversation had been proceeding, Jack Stilwell, who had fled hastily when surprised by the mayor as he was talking to his daughter at the back gate of the garden, had made his way down to the wharves, and there, seating himself upon a pile of wood, had stared moodily at the tract of mud extending from his feet to the strip of water far away.
His position was indeed an unenviable one.

As Mrs.Anthony had said, his father was a clergyman of the Church of England, the vicar of a snug living in Lincolnshire, but he had been cast out when the Parliamentarians gained the upper hand, and his living was handed over to a Sectarian preacher.

When, after years of poverty, King Charles came to the throne, the dispossessed minister thought that as a matter of course he should be restored to his living; but it was not so.

As in hundreds of other cases the new occupant conformed at once to the new laws, and the Rev.Thomas Stilwell, having no friends or interest, was, like many another clergyman, left out in the cold.
But by this time he had settled at Oxford--at which university he had been educated--and was gaining a not uncomfortable livelihood by teaching the sons of citizens.