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CHAPTER XIV.
ALEC'S WHISKEY STOPPED.
"Man he loved
As man, and to the mean and the obscure,
And all the homely in their homely works,
Transferred a courtesy which had no air
Of condescension."Wordsworth.
Frank Brown was one of an army the nineteenth century has enrolled, crusaders who, at home, spend their days fighting "for Christ and Holy Land"—their England; knights who walk abroad, in crowded narrow streets, "redressing human wrong"; "Hearts of Oak," upon whose homely deeds of love no earthly lustre shines; work-day philanthropists seeking, in the sphere of their own life, to work out the social problems others in words dilate upon.
On the river and cricket-field, on platform, in pulpit, Frank Brown had distinguished himself. The fire, however, that inflamed his breast and flashed in his eye, kindled by concern for sinning and sorrowing outcasts of Church and nation, whose unequal lot he grieved over, impelled him to a life far removed from the conventional one in which he had sought to expend his ardour.
The ordinary pastoral work of hunting up parishioners, to augment congregations, and swell collections; the weekly preaching, to order, a discourse to interest or gratify, for the moment, a small circle of self-centred
