While the new Rectory House at Foston was building, the Rector was wholly engrossed in the work. "I live," he wrote, "trowel in hand. My whole soul is filled up by lath and plaster." He laid the foundation-stone in June 1813, and took possession of the completed edifice in March 1814. "My house was considered the ugliest in the county, but all admitted that it was one of the most comfortable."[68] It remains to the present day pretty much as Sydney Smith left it. A room on the ground-floor, next to the drawing-room, served the threefold purposes of study, dispensary, and justice-room. As a rule, he wrote his sermons and his articles for the _Edinburgh_ in the drawing-room, not heeding the conversation of family and visitors; but in the "study" he dosed his parishioners; and here, having been made a Justice of the Peace, he administered mercy to poachers. He hated the Game-Laws as they stood, and it stirred his honest wrath to reflect that "for every ten pheasants which fluttered in the wood, one English peasant was rotting in gaol." So strong was his belief in the contaminating effects of a prisoner's life that he never, if he could help it, would commit a boy or girl to gaol. He sought permission to accompany Mrs. Fry on one of her visits to Newgate, and spoke of her ministry there as "the most solemn, the most Christian, the most affecting, which any human eye ever witnessed."[69] A pleasing trait of his incumbency at Foston was the creation of allotment-gardens for the poor. He divided several acres of the glebe into sixteenths, and let them, at a low rent, to the villagers. Each allotment was just big enough to supply a cottage with potatoes, and to support a pig. Cheap food for the poor was another of his excellent hobbies. His Common-Place Book contains receipts for nourishing soups made of rice and peas and flavoured with ox-cheek. He notes that more than thirty people were comfortably fed with these concoctions at a penny a head. After a bad harvest he and his family lived, like the labourers round them, on unleavened cakes made from the damaged flour of the sprouted wheat. His daughter writes--"The luxury of returning to bread again can hardly be imagined by those who have never been deprived of it."