BROTHER AUGUSTINE
In 1866 I was appointed to the perpetual curacy of Dalton, near Thirsk in Yorkshire. It was a new parish, cut out of Topcliffe; the church was not built at the time, but an old barn had been converted into a school-chapel, and a little red brick house had been erected, intended eventually to be a schoolmaster’s house, which I was given as parsonage. It was small—containing one sitting-room only, and three bedrooms upstairs. When I went to see the place, the outgoing incumbent said to me, “Would you like to take on Mills?”
“Mills! Who is Mills?”
“I mean Brother Augustine.”
“Brother Augustine!” I echoed; “and who the dickens is Brother Augustine?”
“Well,” replied my friend, “that is not so easy to answer. What he is now is my valet and sacristan. He is a man who can make your clothes, mend anything, wait on you, and be most serviceable in church.”
“What! that fellow who sang in the choir through his nose as though there had been a vibrating metallic tongue in it?”
“The same: very useful, but odd.”