Chapter Twenty Five.
How I fall into the hands of an old friend.
Boys may imagine with what astonishment Jim Halliday discovered, on receiving the legacy bequeathed him by his dead friend, that I was the very watch which years before he had known so familiarly as the property of Charlie Newcome. At first he could not believe it, and marvelled how any two watches could be so much alike. Then he discovered the “C.N.” scratched long ago inside, which he well remembered. And further inquiries enabling him to trace me back to the Muggerbridge silversmith, and from him to the pawnbroker’s sale in London, he had no doubt left that I was actually the watch of which nothing had been heard since Tom Drift owned me.
My new master did not long remain in Cambridge after the death of his friend. He left the University in many respects a more thoughtful and earnest man than he had entered it, and in leaving it set himself honestly and faithfully to the work for which he had prepared, and on which his heart was fixed.
I shall not follow him through all the labours of his first village curacy, which lasted a year, during which time many people learned to love the manly, open-hearted young clergyman, and to bless the day when he had been sent among them.
At the end of a year he was removed to the charge of a church in a distant large seaport, where everything was in strangest contrast with the scenes he had just left. Instead of simple villagers and rustics, his work now lay amongst labourers and artisans of the poorest and lowest class. Instead of fresh country air he had now to breathe the vitiated air of close courts and ill-kept streets; and instead of an atmosphere of repose and innocence, he had now to move in an atmosphere of vice and disorder, from which very often his soul turned with a deep disgust. Still he worked manfully at his post with a bold heart, ready to face any hardship in the service of his Master, and never weary of striving by the Spirit’s help to bring into the hard lives around him the elevating joys which they alone know who can call Christ the Saviour theirs. One day an adventure befell him which had a strange bearing on my own fortunes, and the fortunes of more than one of my several masters.
The gaol chaplain at Seatown had recently died, and during the interval necessary for appointing a successor Jim was asked and undertook to add to his other labours that of visiting the prisoners confined there. It was melancholy, and on the whole monotonous work, for the persons whom he thus attended, were mostly stupid, ignorant beings on whose hardened souls it was difficult indeed to make the slightest impression. They listened sulkily to what the chaplain had to say, but to all appearance neither understood nor cared about a single word, and he had the disappointment of noticing, week after week, and month after month, scarcely a sign of good rising out of his labours in the case of any one of them.
One day the governor met him as he was about to pay his customary visits.