not prosecuting him about his drains. You needn't elaborate that point further. I admit it. But I don't see yet that you've proved any actual malice. Lots of quite good men are asses, and mean to do what's right. Simpkins may have been acting from a mistaken sense of duty." 

 "He wasn't. He was acting from a fiendish delight in worrying peaceable people." 

 "Prove that," said Meldon, "and I'll make the man sorry for himself. There's no crime I know more detestable than nagging and worrying with the intention of making other people uncomfortable. In a properly civilised society men who do that would be hanged." 

 "I wish Simpkins was hanged." 

 "Prove your point," said Meldon, "and I'll see that he is hanged, or at all events killed in some other way." 

 "There's no use talking that way, J. J. You can't go out and murder the man." 

 "It won't be murder in this case," said Meldon.  "It will be a perfectly just execution, and I shan't do it myself. I'm a clergyman, and not an executioner. But I'll see that it's done once I'm perfectly satisfied that he deserves it." 

 "He had a row with the rector at a vestry meeting," said the Major, "about the heating of the church." 

 "That settles it," said Meldon.  "I ask for nothing more. The man who's capable of annoying the poor old rector, who has chronic bronchitis and must keep the church up to a pretty fair temperature—" 

 "What Simpkins said was that the church wasn't hot enough." 

 "It's all the same," said Meldon.  "The point is that he worried the rector, who's not physically strong enough to bear it, and who certainly does not deserve it. I didn't mind his attacking you or Doyle. You can both hit back, and if you were any good would have hit back long ago in a way which Simpkins would have disliked intensely. But a clergyman is different. He can't defend himself. He is obliged, by the mere fact of being a clergyman, to sit down under every species of insult which any ill-conditioned corner-boy chooses to sling at him. There was a fellow in my parish, when I first went there, who thought he'd be perfectly safe in ragging me because he knew I was a parson. No later than this morning a horrid rabble of railway porters, and people of that sort, tried to bully me, because, owing to their own ridiculous officiousness, I was forced to travel first 

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