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+Project Gutenberg's The Seaboard Parish Volume 1, by George MacDonald
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Seaboard Parish Volume 1
+
+Author: George MacDonald
+
+Posting Date: March 29, 2014 [EBook #8551]
+Release Date: July, 2005
+First Posted: July 22, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEABOARD PARISH VOLUME 1 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al
+Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SEABOARD PARISH
+
+BY GEORGE MAC DONALD, LL.D.
+
+VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+    I. HOMILETIC
+   II. CONSTANCE'S BIRTHDAY
+  III. THE SICK CHAMBER
+   IV. A SUNDAY EVENING
+    V. MY DREAM
+   VI. THE NEW BABY
+  VII. ANOTHER SUNDAY EVENING
+ VIII. THEODORA'S DOOM
+   IX. A SPRING CHAPTER
+    X. AN IMPORTANT LETTER
+   XI. CONNIE'S DREAM
+  XII. THE JOURNEY
+ XIII. WHAT WE DID WHEN WE ARRIVED
+  XIV. MORE ABOUT KILKHAVEN
+   XV. THE OLD CHURCH
+  XVI. CONNIE'S WATCH-TOWER
+ XVII. MY FIRST SERMON IN THE SEABOARD PARISH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+HOMILETIC.
+
+
+Dear Friends,--I am beginning a new book like an old sermon; but, as
+you know, I have been so accustomed to preach all my life, that
+whatever I say or write will more or less take the shape of a sermon;
+and if you had not by this time learned at least to bear with my
+oddities, you would not have wanted any more of my teaching. And,
+indeed, I did not think you would want any more. I thought I had bidden
+you farewell. But I am seated once again at my writing-table, to write
+for you--with a strange feeling, however, that I am in the heart of
+some curious, rather awful acoustic contrivance, by means of which the
+words which I have a habit of whispering over to myself as I write
+them, are heard aloud by multitudes of people whom I cannot see or
+hear. I will favour the fancy, that, by a sense of your presence, I may
+speak the more truly, as man to man.
+
+But let me, for a moment, suppose that I am your grandfather, and that
+you have all come to beg for a story; and that, therefore, as usually
+happens in such cases, I am sitting with a puzzled face, indicating a
+more puzzled mind. I know that there are a great many stories in the
+holes and corners of my brain; indeed, here is one, there is one,
+peeping out at me like a rabbit; but alas, like a rabbit, showing me
+almost at the same instant the tail-end of it, and vanishing with a
+contemptuous _thud_ of its hind feet on the ground. For I must have
+suitable regard to the desires of my children. It is a fine thing to be
+able to give people what they want, if at the same time you can give
+them what you want. To give people what they want, would sometimes be
+to give them only dirt and poison. To give them what you want, might be
+to set before them something of which they could not eat a mouthful.
+What both you and I want, I am willing to think, is a dish of good
+wholesome venison. Now I suppose my children around me are neither
+young enough nor old enough to care about a fairy tale, go that will
+not do. What they want is, I believe, something that I know about--that
+has happened to myself. Well, I confess, that is the kind of thing I
+like best to hear anybody talk to me about. Let anyone tell me
+something that has happened to himself, especially if he will give me a
+peep into how his heart took it, as it sat in its own little room with
+the closed door, and that person will, so telling, absorb my attention:
+he has something true and genuine and valuable to communicate. They are
+mostly old people that can do so. Not that young people have nothing
+happen to them; but that only when they grow old, are they able to see
+things right, to disentangle confusions, and judge righteous judgment.
+Things which at the time appeared insignificant or wearisome, then give
+out the light that was in them, show their own truth, interest, and
+influence: they are far enough off to be seen. It is not when we are
+nearest to anything that we know best what it is. How I should like to
+write a story for old people! The young are always having stories
+written for them. Why should not the old people come in for a share? A
+story without a young person in it at all! Nobody under fifty admitted!
+It could hardly be a fairy tale, could it? Or a love story either? I am
+not so sure about that. The worst of it would be, however, that hardly
+a young person would read it. Now, we old people would not like that.
+We can read young people's books and enjoy them: they would not try to
+read old men's books or old women's books; they would be so sure of
+their being dry. My dear old brothers and sisters, we know better, do
+we not? We have nice old jokes, with no end of fun in them; only they
+cannot see the fun. We have strange tales, that we know to be true, and
+which look more and more marvellous every time we turn them over again;
+only somehow they do not belong to the ways of this year--I was going
+to say _week_,--and so the young people generally do not care to hear
+them. I have had one pale-faced boy, to be sure, who will sit at his
+mother's feet, and listen for hours to what took place before he was
+born. To him his mother's wedding-gown was as old as Eve's coat of
+skins. But then he was young enough not yet to have had a chance of
+losing the childhood common to the young and the old. Ah! I should like
+to write for you, old men, old women, to help you to read the past, to
+help you to look for the future. Now is your salvation nearer than when
+you believed; for, however your souls may be at peace, however your
+quietness and confidence may give you strength, in the decay of your
+earthly tabernacle, in the shortening of its cords, in the weakening of
+its stakes, in the rents through which you see the stars, you have yet
+your share in the cry of the creation after the sonship. But the one
+thing I should keep saying to you, my companions in old age, would be,
+"Friends, let us not grow old." Old age is but a mask; let us not call
+the mask the face. Is the acorn old, because its cup dries and drops it
+from its hold--because its skin has grown brown and cracks in the
+earth? Then only is a man growing old when he ceases to have sympathy
+with the young. That is a sign that his heart has begun to wither. And
+that is a dreadful kind of old age. The heart needs never be old.
+Indeed it should always be growing younger. Some of us feel younger, do
+we not, than when we were nine or ten? It is not necessary to be able
+to play at leapfrog to enjoy the game. There are young creatures whose
+turn it is, and perhaps whose duty it would be, to play at leap-frog if
+there was any necessity for putting the matter in that light; and for
+us, we have the privilege, or if we will not accept the privilege, then
+I say we have the duty, of enjoying their leap-frog. But if we must
+withdraw in a measure from sociable relations with our fellows, let it
+be as the wise creatures that creep aside and wrap themselves up and
+lay themselves by that their wings may grow and put on the lovely hues
+of their coming resurrection. Such a withdrawing is in the name of
+youth. And while it is pleasant--no one knows how pleasant except him
+who experiences it--to sit apart and see the drama of life going on
+around him, while his feelings are calm and free, his vision clear, and
+his judgment righteous, the old man must ever be ready, should the
+sweep of action catch him in its skirts, to get on his tottering old
+legs, and go with brave heart to do the work of a true man, none the
+less true that his hands tremble, and that he would gladly return to
+his chimney-corner. If he is never thus called out, let him examine
+himself, lest he should be falling into the number of those that say,
+"I go, sir," and go not; who are content with thinking beautiful things
+in an Atlantis, Oceana, Arcadia, or what it may be, but put not forth
+one of their fingers to work a salvation in the earth. Better than such
+is the man who, using just weights and a true balance, sells good
+flour, and never has a thought of his own.
+
+I have been talking--to my reader is it? or to my supposed group of
+grandchildren? I remember--to my companions in old age. It is time I
+returned to the company who are hearing my whispers at the other side
+of the great thundering gallery. I take leave of my old friends with
+one word: We have yet a work to do, my friends; but a work we shall
+never do aright after ceasing to understand the new generation. We are
+not the men, neither shall wisdom die with us. The Lord hath not
+forsaken his people because the young ones do not think just as the old
+ones choose. The Lord has something fresh to tell them, and is getting
+them ready to receive his message. When we are out of sympathy with the
+young, then I think our work in this world is over. It might end more
+honourably.
+
+Now, readers in general, I have had time to consider what to tell you
+about, and how to begin. My story will be rather about my family than
+myself now. I was as it were a little withdrawn, even by the time of
+which I am about to write. I had settled into a gray-haired, quite
+elderly, yet active man--young still, in fact, to what I am now. But
+even then, though my faith had grown stronger, life had grown sadder,
+and needed all my stronger faith; for the vanishing of beloved faces,
+and the trials of them that are dear, will make even those that look
+for a better country both for themselves and their friends, sad, though
+it will be with a preponderance of the first meaning of the word _sad_,
+which was _settled_, _thoughtful_.
+
+I am again seated in the little octagonal room, which I have made my
+study because I like it best. It is rather a shame, for my books cover
+over every foot of the old oak panelling. But they make the room all
+the pleasanter to the eye, and after I am gone, there is the old oak,
+none the worse, for anyone who prefers it to books.
+
+I intend to use as the central portion of my present narrative the
+history of a year during part of which I took charge of a friend's
+parish, while my brother-in-law, Thomas Weir, who was and is still my
+curate, took the entire charge of Marshmallows. What led to this will
+soon appear. I will try to be minute enough in my narrative to make my
+story interesting, although it will cost me suffering to recall some of
+the incidents I have to narrate.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+CONSTANCE'S BIRTHDAY.
+
+
+Was it from observation of nature in its association with human nature,
+or from artistic feeling alone, that Shakspere so often represents
+Nature's mood as in harmony with the mood of the principal actors in
+his drama? I know I have so often found Nature's mood in harmony with
+my own, even when she had nothing to do with forming mine, that in
+looking back I have wondered at the fact. There may, however, be some
+self-deception about it. At all events, on the morning of my
+Constance's eighteenth birthday, a lovely October day with a golden
+east, clouds of golden foliage about the ways, and an air that seemed
+filled with the ether of an _aurum potabile_, there came yet an
+occasional blast of wind, which, without being absolutely cold, smelt
+of winter, and made one draw one's shoulders together with the sense of
+an unfriendly presence. I do not think Constance felt it at all,
+however, as she stood on the steps in her riding-habit, waiting till
+the horses made their appearance. It had somehow grown into a custom
+with us that each of the children, as his or her birthday came round,
+should be king or queen for that day, and, subject to the veto of
+father and mother, should have everything his or her own way. Let me
+say for them, however, that in the matter of choosing the dinner, which
+of course was included in the royal prerogative, I came to see that it
+was almost invariably the favourite dishes of others of the family that
+were chosen, and not those especially agreeable to the royal palate.
+Members of families where children have not been taught from their
+earliest years that the great privilege of possession is the right to
+bestow, may regard this as an improbable assertion; but others will
+know that it might well enough be true, even if I did not say that so
+it was. But there was always the choice of some individual treat, which
+was determined solely by the preference of the individual in authority.
+Constance had chosen "a long ride with papa."
+
+I suppose a parent may sometimes be right when he speaks with
+admiration of his own children. The probability of his being correct is
+to be determined by the amount of capacity he has for admiring other
+people's children. However this may be in my own case, I venture to
+assert that Constance did look very lovely that morning. She was fresh
+as the young day: we were early people--breakfast and prayers were
+over, and it was nine o'clock as she stood on the steps and I
+approached her from the lawn.
+
+"O, papa! isn't it jolly?" she said merrily.
+
+"Very jolly indeed, my dear," I answered, delighted to hear the word
+from the lips of my gentle daughter. She very seldom used a slang word,
+and when she did, she used it like a lady. Shall I tell you what she
+was like? Ah! you could not see her as I saw her that morning if I did.
+I will, however, try to give you a general idea, just in order that you
+and I should not be picturing to ourselves two very different persons
+while I speak of her.
+
+She was rather little, and so slight that she looked tall. I have often
+observed that the impression of height is an affair of proportion, and
+has nothing to do with feet and inches. She was rather fair in
+complexion, with her mother's blue eyes, and her mother's long dark
+wavy hair. She was generally playful, and took greater liberties with
+me than any of the others; only with her liberties, as with her slang,
+she knew instinctively when, where, and how much. For on the borders of
+her playfulness there seemed ever to hang a fringe of thoughtfulness,
+as if she felt that the present moment owed all its sparkle and
+brilliance to the eternal sunlight. And the appearance was not in the
+least a deceptive one. The eternal was not far from her--none the
+farther that she enjoyed life like a bird, that her laugh was merry,
+that her heart was careless, and that her voice rang through the
+house--a sweet soprano voice--singing snatches of songs (now a street
+tune she had caught from a London organ, now an air from Handel or
+Mozart), or that she would sometimes tease her elder sister about her
+solemn and anxious looks; for Wynnie, the eldest, had to suffer for her
+grandmother's sins against her daughter, and came into the world with a
+troubled little heart, that was soon compelled to flee for refuge to
+the rock that was higher than she. Ah! my Constance! But God was good
+to you and to us in you.
+
+"Where shall we go, Connie?" I said, and the same moment the sound of
+the horses' hoofs reached us.
+
+"Would it be too far to go to Addicehead?" she returned.
+
+"It is a long ride," I answered.
+
+"Too much for the pony?"
+
+"O dear, no--not at all. I was thinking of you, not of the pony."
+
+"I'm quite as able to ride as the pony is to carry me, papa. And I want
+to get something for Wynnie. Do let us go."
+
+"Very well, my dear," I said, and raised her to the saddle--if I may
+say _raised_, for no bird ever hopped more lightly from one twig to
+another than she sprung from the ground on her pony's back.
+
+In a moment I was beside her, and away we rode.
+
+The shadows were still long, the dew still pearly on the spiders' webs,
+as we trotted out of our own grounds into a lane that led away towards
+the high road. Our horses were fresh and the air was exciting; so we
+turned from the hard road into the first suitable field, and had a
+gallop to begin with. Constance was a good horse-woman, for she had
+been used to the saddle longer than she could remember. She was now
+riding a tall well-bred pony, with plenty of life--rather too much, I
+sometimes thought, when I was out with Wynnie; but I never thought so
+when I was with Constance. Another field or two sufficiently quieted
+both animals--I did not want to have all our time taken up with their
+frolics--and then we began to talk.
+
+"You are getting quite a woman now, Connie, my dear," I said.
+
+"Quite an old grannie, papa," she answered.
+
+"Old enough to think about what's coming next," I said gravely.
+
+"O, papa! And you are always telling us that we must not think about
+the morrow, or even the next hour. But, then, that's in the pulpit,"
+she added, with a sly look up at me from under the drooping feather of
+her pretty hat.
+
+"You know very well what I mean, you puss," I answered. "And I don't
+say one thing in the pulpit and another out of it."
+
+She was at my horse's shoulder with a bound, as if Spry, her pony, had
+been of one mind and one piece with her. She was afraid she had
+offended me. She looked up into mine with as anxious a face as ever I
+saw upon Wynnie.
+
+"O, thank you, papa!" she said when I smiled. "I thought I had been
+rude. I didn't mean it, indeed I didn't. But I do wish you would make
+it a little plainer to me. I do think about things sometimes, though
+you would hardly believe it."
+
+"What do you want made plainer, my child?" I asked.
+
+"When we're to think, and when we're not to think," she answered.
+
+I remember all of this conversation because of what came so soon after.
+
+"If the known duty of to-morrow depends on the work of to-day," I
+answered, "if it cannot be done right except you think about it and lay
+your plans for it, then that thought is to-day's business, not
+to-morrow's."
+
+"Dear papa, some of your explanations are more difficult than the
+things themselves. May I be as impertinent as I like on my birthday?"
+she asked suddenly, again looking up in my face.
+
+We were walking now, and she had a hold of my horse's mane, so as to
+keep her pony close up.
+
+"Yes, my dear, as impertinent as you like--not an atom more, mind."
+
+"Well, papa, I sometimes wish you wouldn't explain things so much. I
+seem to understand you all the time you are preaching, but when I try
+the text afterwards by myself, I can't make anything of it, and I've
+forgotten every word you said about it."
+
+"Perhaps that is because you have no right to understand it."
+
+"I thought all Protestants had a right to understand every word of the
+Bible," she returned.
+
+"If they can," I rejoined. "But last Sunday, for instance, I did not
+expect anybody there to understand a certain bit of my sermon, except
+your mamma and Thomas Weir."
+
+"How funny! What part of it was that?"
+
+"O! I'm not going to tell you. You have no right to understand it. But
+most likely you thought you understood it perfectly, and it appeared to
+you, in consequence, very commonplace."
+
+"In consequence of what?"
+
+"In consequence of your thinking you understood it."
+
+"O, papa dear! you're getting worse and worse. It's not often I ask you
+anything--and on my birthday too! It is really too bad of you to
+bewilder my poor little brains in this way."
+
+"I will try to make you see what I mean, my pet. No talk about an idea
+that you never had in your head at all, can make you have that idea. If
+you had never seen a horse, no description even, not to say no amount
+of remark, would bring the figure of a horse before your mind. Much
+more is this the case with truths that belong to the convictions and
+feelings of the heart. Suppose a man had never in his life asked God
+for anything, or thanked God for anything, would his opinion as to what
+David meant in one of his worshipping psalms be worth much? The whole
+thing would be beyond him. If you have never known what it is to have
+care of any kind upon you, you cannot understand what our Lord means
+when he tells us to take no thought for the morrow."
+
+"But indeed, papa, I am very full of care sometimes, though not perhaps
+about to-morrow precisely. But that does not matter, does it?"
+
+"Certainly not. Tell me what you are full of care about, my child, and
+perhaps I can help you."
+
+"You often say, papa, that half the misery in this world comes from
+idleness, and that you do not believe that in a world where God is at
+work every day, Sundays not excepted, it could have been intended that
+women any more than men should have nothing to do. Now what am I to do?
+What have I been sent into the world for? I don't see it; and I feel
+very useless and wrong sometimes."
+
+"I do not think there is very much to complain of you in that respect,
+Connie. You, and your sister as well, help me very much in my parish.
+You take much off your mother's hands too. And you do a good deal for
+the poor. You teach your younger brothers and sister, and meantime you
+are learning yourselves."
+
+"Yes, but that's not work."
+
+"It is work. And it is the work that is given you to do at present. And
+you would do it much better if you were to look at it in that light.
+Not that I have anything to complain of."
+
+"But I don't want to stop at home and lead an easy, comfortable life,
+when there are so many to help everywhere in the world."
+
+"Is there anything better in doing something where God has not placed
+you, than in doing it where he has placed you?"
+
+"No, papa. But my sisters are quite enough for all you have for us to
+do at home. Is nobody ever to go away to find the work meant for her?
+You won't think, dear papa, that I want to get away from home, will
+you?"
+
+"No, my dear. I believe that you are really thinking about duty. And
+now comes the moment for considering the passage to which you began by
+referring:--What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give
+yourself the least trouble about. Everything he gives you to do, you
+must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible
+preparation for what he may want you to do next. If people would but do
+what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what
+came next. And I do not believe that those who follow this rule are
+ever left floundering on the sea-deserted sands of inaction, unable to
+find water enough to swim in."
+
+"Thank you, dear papa. That's a little sermon all to myself, and I
+think I shall understand it even when I think about it afterwards. Now
+let's have a trot."
+
+"There is one thing more I ought to speak about though, Connie. It is
+not your moral nature alone you ought to cultivate. You ought to make
+yourself as worth God's making as you possibly can. Now I am a little
+doubtful whether you keep up your studies at all."
+
+She shrugged her pretty shoulders playfully, looking up in my face
+again.
+
+"I don't like dry things, papa."
+
+"Nobody does."
+
+"Nobody!" she exclaimed. "How do the grammars and history-books come to
+be written then?"
+
+In talking to me, somehow, the child always put on a more childish tone
+than when she talked to anyone else. I am certain there was no
+affection in it, though. Indeed, how could she be affected with her
+fault-finding old father?
+
+"No. Those books are exceedingly interesting to the people that make
+them. Dry things are just things that you do not know enough about to
+care for them. And all you learn at school is next to nothing to what
+you have to learn."
+
+"What must I do then?" she asked with a sigh. "Must I go all over my
+French Grammar again? O dear! I do hate it so!"
+
+"If you will tell me something you like, Connie, instead of something
+you don't like, I may be able to give you advice. Is there nothing you
+are fond of?" I continued, finding that she remained silent.
+
+"I don't know anything in particular--that is, I don't know anything in
+the way of school-work that I really liked. I don't mean that I didn't
+try to do what I had to do, for I did. There was just one thing I
+liked--the poetry we had to learn once a week. But I suppose gentlemen
+count that silly--don't they?"
+
+"On the contrary, my dear, I would make that liking of yours the
+foundation of all your work. Besides, I think poetry the grandest thing
+God has given us--though perhaps you and I might not quite agree about
+what poetry was poetry enough to be counted an especial gift of God.
+Now, what poetry do you like best?"
+
+"Mrs. Hemans's, I think, papa."
+
+"Well, very well, to begin with. 'There is,' as Mr. Carlyle said to a
+friend of mine--'There is a thin vein of true poetry in Mrs. Hemans.'
+But it is time you had done with thin things, however good they may be.
+Most people never get beyond spoon-meat--in this world, at least, and
+they expect nothing else in the world to come. I must take you in hand
+myself, and see what I can do for you. It is wretched to see capable
+enough creatures, all for want of a little guidance, bursting with
+admiration of what owes its principal charm to novelty of form, gained
+at the cost of expression and sense. Not that that applies to Mrs.
+Hemans. She is simple enough, only diluted to a degree. But I hold that
+whatever mental food you take should be just a little too strong for
+you. That implies trouble, necessitates growth, and involves delight."
+
+"I sha'n't mind how difficult it is if you help me, papa. But it is
+anything but satisfactory to go groping on without knowing what you are
+about."
+
+I ought to have mentioned that Constance had been at school for two
+years, and had only been home a month that very day, in order to
+account for my knowing so little about her tastes and habits of mind.
+We went on talking a little more in the same way, and if I were writing
+for young people only, I should be tempted to go on a little farther
+with the account of what we said to each other; for it might help some
+of them to see that the thing they like best should, circumstances and
+conscience permitting, be made the centre from which they start to
+learn; that they should go on enlarging their knowledge all round from
+that one point at which God intended them to begin. But at length we
+fell into a silence, a very happy one on my part; for I was more than
+delighted to find that this one too of my children was following after
+the truth--wanting to do what was right, namely, to obey the word of
+the Lord, whether openly spoken to all, or to herself in the voice of
+her own conscience and the light of that understanding which is the
+candle of the Lord. I had often said to myself in past years, when I
+had found myself in the company of young ladies who announced their
+opinions--probably of no deeper origin than the prejudices of their
+nurses--as if these distinguished them from all the world besides; who
+were profound upon passion and ignorant of grace; who had not a notion
+whether a dress was beautiful, but only whether it was of the newest
+cut--I had often said to myself: "What shall I do if my daughters come
+to talk and think like that--if thinking it can be called?" but being
+confident that instruction for which the mind is not prepared only lies
+in a rotting heap, producing all kinds of mental evils correspondent to
+the results of successive loads of food which the system cannot
+assimilate, my hope had been to rouse wise questions in the minds of my
+children, in place of overwhelming their digestions with what could be
+of no instruction or edification without the foregoing appetite. Now my
+Constance had begun to ask me questions, and it made me very happy. We
+had thus come a long way nearer to each other; for however near the
+affection of human animals may bring them, there are abysses between
+soul and soul--the souls even of father and daughter--over which they
+must pass to meet. And I do not believe that any two human beings alive
+know yet what it is to love as love is in the glorious will of the
+Father of lights.
+
+I linger on with my talk, for I shrink from what I must relate.
+
+We were going at a gentle trot, silent, along a woodland path--a brown,
+soft, shady road, nearly five miles from home, our horses scattering
+about the withered leaves that lay thick upon it. A good deal of
+underwood and a few large trees had been lately cleared from the place.
+There were many piles of fagots about, and a great log lying here and
+there along the side of the path. One of these, when a tree, had been
+struck by lightning, and had stood till the frosts and rains had bared
+it of its bark. Now it lay white as a skeleton by the side of the path,
+and was, I think, the cause of what followed. All at once my daughter's
+pony sprang to the other side of the road, shying sideways; unsettled
+her so, I presume; then rearing and plunging, threw her from the saddle
+across one of the logs of which I have spoken. I was by her side in a
+moment. To my horror she lay motionless. Her eyes were closed, and when
+I took her up in my arms she did not open them. I laid her on the moss,
+and got some water and sprinkled her face. Then she revived a little;
+but seemed in much pain, and all at once went off into another faint. I
+was in terrible perplexity.
+
+Presently a man who, having been cutting fagots at a little distance,
+had seen the pony careering through the wood, came up and asked what he
+could do to help me. I told him to take my horse, whose bridle I had
+thrown over the latch of a gate, and ride to Oldcastle Hall, and ask
+Mrs. Walton to come with the carriage as quickly as possible. "Tell
+her," I said, "that her daughter has had a fall from her pony, and is
+rather shaken. Ride as hard as you can go."
+
+The man was off in a moment; and there I sat watching my poor child,
+for what seemed to be a dreadfully long time before the carriage
+arrived. She had come to herself quite, but complained of much pain in
+her back; and, to my distress, I found that she could not move herself
+enough to make the least change of her position. She evidently tried to
+keep up as well as she could; but her face expressed great suffering:
+it was dreadfully pale, and looked worn with a month's illness. All my
+fear was for her spine.
+
+At length I caught sight of the carriage, coming through the wood as
+fast as the road would allow, with the woodman on the box, directing
+the coachman. It drew up, and my wife got out. She was as pale as
+Constance, but quiet and firm, her features composed almost to
+determination. I had never seen her look like that before. She asked no
+questions: there was time enough for that afterwards. She had brought
+plenty of cushions and pillows, and we did all we could to make an easy
+couch for the poor girl; but she moaned dreadfully as we lifted her
+into the carriage. We did our best to keep her from being shaken; but
+those few miles were the longest journey I ever made in my life.
+
+When we reached home at length, we found that Ethel, or, as we commonly
+called her, using the other end of her name, Wynnie--for she was named
+after her mother--had got a room on the ground-floor, usually given to
+visitors, ready for her sister; and we were glad indeed not to have to
+carry her up the stairs. Before my wife left, she had sent the groom
+off to Addicehead for both physician and surgeon. A young man who had
+settled at Marshmallows as general practitioner a year or two before,
+was waiting for us when we arrived. He helped us to lay her upon a
+mattress in the position in which she felt the least pain. But why
+should I linger over the sorrowful detail? All agreed that the poor
+child's spine was seriously injured, and that probably years of
+suffering were before her. Everything was done that could be done; but
+she was not moved from that room for nine months, during which, though
+her pain certainly grew less by degrees, her want of power to move
+herself remained almost the same.
+
+When I had left her at last a little composed, with her mother seated
+by her bedside, I called my other two daughters--Wynnie, the eldest,
+and Dorothy, the youngest, whom I found seated on the floor outside,
+one on each side of the door, weeping--into my study, and said to them:
+"My darlings, this is very sad; but you must remember that it is God's
+will; and as you would both try to bear it cheerfully if it had fallen
+to your lot to bear, you must try to be cheerful even when it is your
+sister's part to endure."
+
+"O, papa! poor Connie!" cried Dora, and burst into fresh tears.
+
+Wynnie said nothing, but knelt down by my knee, and laid her cheek upon
+it.
+
+"Shall I tell you what Constance said to me just before I left the
+room?" I asked.
+
+"Please do, papa."
+
+"She whispered, 'You must try to bear it, all of you, as well as you
+can. I don't mind it very much, only for you.' So, you see, if you want
+to make her comfortable, you must not look gloomy and troubled. Sick
+people like to see cheerful faces about them; and I am sure Connie will
+not suffer nearly so much if she finds that she does not make the
+household gloomy."
+
+This I had learned from being ill myself once or twice since my
+marriage. My wife never came near me with a gloomy face, and I had
+found that it was quite possible to be sympathetic with those of my
+flock who were ill without putting on a long face when I went to see
+them. Of course, I do not mean that I could, or that it was desirable
+that I should, look cheerful when any were in great pain or mental
+distress. But in ordinary conditions of illness a cheerful countenance
+is as a message of _all's well_, which may surely be carried into a
+sick chamber by the man who believes that the heart of a loving Father
+is at the centre of things, that he is light all about the darkness,
+and that he will not only bring good out of evil at last, but will be
+with the sufferer all the time, making endurance possible, and pain
+tolerable. There are a thousand alleviations that people do not often
+think of, coming from God himself. Would you not say, for instance,
+that time must pass very slowly in pain? But have you never observed,
+or has no one ever made the remark to you, how strangely fast, even in
+severe pain, the time passes after all?
+
+"We will do all we can, will we not," I went on, "to make her as
+comfortable as possible? You, Dora, must attend to your little
+brothers, that your mother may not have too much to think about now
+that she will have Connie to nurse."
+
+They could not say much, but they both kissed me, and went away leaving
+me to understand clearly enough that they had quite understood me. I
+then returned to the sick chamber, where I found that the poor child
+had fallen asleep.
+
+My wife and I watched by her bedside on alternate nights, until the
+pain had so far subsided, and the fever was so far reduced, that we
+could allow Wynnie to take a share in the office. We could not think of
+giving her over to the care of any but one of ourselves during the
+night. Her chief suffering came from its being necessary that she
+should keep nearly one position on her back, because of her spine,
+while the external bruise and the swelling of the muscles were in
+consequence so painful, that it needed all that mechanical contrivance
+could do to render the position endurable. But these outward conditions
+were greatly ameliorated before many days were over.
+
+This is a dreary beginning of my story, is it not? But sickness of all
+kinds is such a common thing in the world, that it is well sometimes to
+let our minds rest upon it, lest it should take us altogether at
+unawares, either in ourselves or our friends, when it comes. If it were
+not a good thing in the end, surely it would not be; and perhaps before
+I have done my readers will not be sorry that my tale began so
+gloomily. The sickness in Judaea eighteen hundred and thirty-five years
+ago, or thereabouts, has no small part in the story of him who came to
+put all things under our feet. Praise be to him for evermore!
+
+It soon became evident to me that that room was like a new and more
+sacred heart to the house. At first it radiated gloom to the remotest
+corners; but soon rays of light began to appear mingling with the
+gloom. I could see that bits of news were carried from it to the
+servants in the kitchen, in the garden, in the stable, and over the way
+to the home-farm. Even in the village, and everywhere over the parish,
+I was received more kindly, and listened to more willingly, because of
+the trouble I and my family were in; while in the house, although we
+had never been anything else than a loving family, it was easy to
+discover that we all drew more closely together in consequence of our
+common anxiety. Previous to this, it had been no unusual thing to see
+Wynnie and Dora impatient with each other; for Dora was none the less a
+wild, somewhat lawless child, that she was a profoundly affectionate
+one. She rather resembled her cousin Judy, in fact--whom she called
+Aunt Judy, and with whom she was naturally a great favourite. Wynnie,
+on the other hand, was sedate, and rather severe--more severe, I must
+in justice say, with herself than with anyone else. I had sometimes
+wished, it is true, that her mother, in regard to the younger children,
+were more like her; but there I was wrong. For one of the great goods
+that come of having two parents, is that the one balances and rectifies
+the motions of the other. No one is good but God. No one holds the
+truth, or can hold it, in one and the same thought, but God. Our human
+life is often, at best, but an oscillation between the extremes which
+together make the truth; and it is not a bad thing in a family, that
+the pendulums of father and mother should differ in movement so far,
+that when the one is at one extremity of the swing, the other should be
+at the other, so that they meet only in the point of _indifference_, in
+the middle; that the predominant tendency of the one should not be the
+predominant tendency of the other. I was a very strict
+disciplinarian--too much so, perhaps, sometimes: Ethelwyn, on the other
+hand, was too much inclined, I thought, to excuse everything. I was
+law, she was grace. But grace often yielded to law, and law sometimes
+yielded to grace. Yet she represented the higher; for in the ultimate
+triumph of grace, in the glad performance of the command from love of
+what is commanded, the law is fulfilled: the law is a schoolmaster to
+bring us to Christ. I must say this for myself, however, that, although
+obedience was the one thing I enforced, believing it the one thing upon
+which all family economy primarily depends, yet my object always was to
+set my children free from my law as soon as possible; in a word, to
+help them to become, as soon as it might be, a law unto themselves.
+Then they would need no more of mine. Then I would go entirely over to
+the mother's higher side, and become to them, as much as in me lay, no
+longer law and truth, but grace and truth. But to return to my
+children--it was soon evident not only that Wynnie had grown more
+indulgent to Dora's vagaries, but that Dora was more submissive to
+Wynnie, while the younger children began to obey their eldest sister
+with a willing obedience, keeping down their effervescence within
+doors, and letting it off only out of doors, or in the out-houses.
+
+When Constance began to recover a little, then the sacredness of that
+chamber began to show itself more powerfully, radiating on all sides a
+yet stronger influence of peace and goodwill. It was like a fountain of
+gentle light, quieting and bringing more or less into tune all that
+came within the circle of its sweetness. This brings me to speak again
+of my lovely child. For surely a father may speak thus of a child of
+God. He cannot regard his child as his even as a book he has written
+may be his. A man's child is his because God has said to him, "Take
+this child and nurse it for me." She is God's making; God's marvellous
+invention, to be tended and cared for, and ministered unto as one of
+his precious things; a young angel, let me say, who needs the air of
+this lower world to make her wings grow. And while he regards her thus,
+he will see all other children in the same light, and will not dare to
+set up his own against others of God's brood with the new-budding
+wings. The universal heart of truth will thus rectify, while it
+intensifies, the individual feeling towards one's own; and the man who
+is most free from poor partisanship in regard to his own family, will
+feel the most individual tenderness for the lovely human creatures whom
+God has given into his own especial care and responsibility. Show me
+the man who is tender, reverential, gracious towards the children of
+other men, and I will show you the man who will love and tend his own
+best, to whose heart his own will flee for their first refuge after
+God, when they catch sight of the cloud in the wind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE SICK CHAMBER.
+
+
+In the course of a month there was a good deal more of light in the
+smile with which my darling greeted me when I entered her room in the
+morning. Her pain was greatly gone, but the power of moving her limbs
+had not yet even begun to show itself.
+
+One day she received me with a still happier smile than I had yet seen
+upon her face, put out her thin white hand, took mine and kissed it,
+and said, "Papa," with a lingering on the last syllable.
+
+"What is it, my pet?" I asked.
+
+"I am so happy!"
+
+"What makes you so happy?" I asked again.
+
+"I don't know," she answered. "I haven't thought about it yet. But
+everything looks so pleasant round me. Is it nearly winter yet, papa?
+I've forgotten all about how the time has been going."
+
+"It is almost winter, my dear. There is hardly a leaf left on the
+trees--just two or three disconsolate yellow ones that want to get away
+down to the rest. They go fluttering and fluttering and trying to break
+away, but they can't."
+
+"That is just as I felt a little while ago. I wanted to die and get
+away, papa; for I thought I should never be well again, and I should be
+in everybody's way.--I am afraid I shall not get well, after all," she
+added, and the light clouded on her sweet face.
+
+"Well, my darling, we are in God's hands. We shall never get tired of
+you, and you must not get tired of us. Would you get tired of nursing
+me, if I were ill?"
+
+"O, papa!" And the tears began to gather in her eyes.
+
+"Then you must think we are not able to love so well as you."
+
+"I know what you mean. I did not think of it that way. I will never
+think so about it again. I was only thinking how useless I was."
+
+"There you are quite mistaken, my dear. No living creature ever was
+useless. You've got plenty to do there."
+
+"But what have I got to do? I don't feel able for anything," she said;
+and again the tears came in her eyes, as if I had been telling her to
+get up and she could not.
+
+"A great deal of our work," I answered, "we do without knowing what it
+is. But I'll tell you what you have got to do: you have got to believe
+in God, and in everybody in this house."
+
+"I do, I do. But that is easy to do," she returned.
+
+"And do you think that the work God gives us to do is never easy? Jesus
+says his yoke is easy, his burden is light. People sometimes refuse to
+do God's work just because it is easy. This is, sometimes, because they
+cannot believe that easy work is his work; but there may be a very bad
+pride in it: it may be because they think that there is little or no
+honour to be got in that way; and therefore they despise it. Some again
+accept it with half a heart, and do it with half a hand. But, however
+easy any work may be, it cannot be well done without taking thought
+about it. And such people, instead of taking thought about their work,
+generally take thought about the morrow, in which no work can be done
+any more than in yesterday. The Holy Present!--I think I must make one
+more sermon about it--although you, Connie," I said, meaning it for a
+little joke, "do think that I have said too much about it already."
+
+"Papa, papa! do forgive me. This is a judgment on me for talking to you
+as I did that dreadful morning. But I was so happy that I was
+impertinent."
+
+"You silly darling!" I said. "A judgment! God be angry with you for
+that! Even if it had been anything wrong, which it was not, do you
+think God has no patience? No, Connie. I will tell you what seems to me
+much more likely. You wanted something to do; and so God gave you
+something to do."
+
+"Lying in bed and doing nothing!"
+
+"Yes. Just lying in bed, and doing his will."
+
+"If I could but feel that I was doing his will!"
+
+"When you do it, then you will feel you are doing it."
+
+"I know you are coming to something, papa. Please make haste, for my
+back is getting so bad."
+
+"I've tired you, my pet. It was very thoughtless of me. I will tell you
+the rest another time," I said, rising.
+
+"No, no. It will make me much worse not to hear it all now."
+
+"Well, I will tell you. Be still, my darling, I won't be long. In the
+time of the old sacrifices, when God so kindly told his ignorant
+children to do something for him in that way, poor people were told to
+bring, not a bullock or a sheep, for that was more than they could get,
+but a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons. But now, as Crashaw
+the poet says, 'Ourselves become our own best sacrifice.' God wanted to
+teach people to offer themselves. Now, you are poor, my pet, and you
+cannot offer yourself in great things done for your fellow-men, which
+was the way Jesus did. But you must remember that the two young pigeons
+of the poor were just as acceptable to God as the fat bullock of the
+rich. Therefore you must say to God something like this:--'O heavenly
+Father, I have nothing to offer thee but my patience. I will bear thy
+will, and so offer my will a burnt-offering unto thee. I will be as
+useless as thou pleasest.' Depend upon it, my darling, in the midst of
+all the science about the world and its ways, and all the ignorance of
+God and his greatness, the man or woman who can thus say, _Thy will be
+done_, with the true heart of giving up is nearer the secret of things
+than the geologist and theologian. And now, my darling, be quiet in
+God's name."
+
+She held up her mouth to kiss me, but did not speak, and I left her,
+and sent Dora to sit with her.
+
+In the evening, when I went into her room again, having been out in my
+parish all the morning, I began to unload my budget of small events.
+Indeed, we all came in like pelicans with stuffed pouches to empty them
+in her room, as if she had been the only young one we had, and we must
+cram her with news. Or, rather, she was like the queen of the
+commonwealth sending out her messages into all parts, and receiving
+messages in return. I might call her the brain of the house; but I have
+used similes enough for a while.
+
+After I had done talking, she said--
+
+"And you have been to the school too, papa?"
+
+"Yes. I go to the school almost every day. I fancy in such a school as
+ours the young people get more good than they do in church. You know I
+had made a great change in the Sunday-school just before you came home."
+
+"I heard of that, papa. You won't let any of the little ones go to
+school on the Sunday."
+
+"No. It is too much for them. And having made this change, I feel the
+necessity of being in the school myself nearly every day, that I may do
+something direct for the little ones."
+
+"And you'll have to take me up soon, as you promised, you know,
+papa--just before Sprite threw me."
+
+"As soon as you like, my dear, after you are able to read again."
+
+"O, you must begin before that, please.--You could spare time to read a
+little to me, couldn't you?" she said doubtfully, as if she feared she
+was asking too much.
+
+"Certainly, my dear; and I will begin to think about it at once."
+
+It was in part the result of this wish of my child's that it became the
+custom to gather in her room on Sunday evenings. She was quite unable
+for any kind of work such as she would have had me commence with her,
+but I used to take something to read to her every now and then, and
+always after our early tea on Sundays.
+
+What a thing it is to have one to speak and think about and try to find
+out and understand, who is always and altogether and perfectly good!
+Such a centre that is for all our thoughts and words and actions and
+imaginations! It is indeed blessed to be human beings with Jesus Christ
+for the centre of humanity.
+
+In the papers wherein I am about to record the chief events of the
+following years of my life, I shall give a short account of what passed
+at some of these assemblies in my child's room, in the hope that it may
+give my friends something, if not new, yet fresh to think about. For
+God has so made us that everyone who thinks at all thinks in a way that
+must be more or less fresh to everyone else who thinks, if he only have
+the gift of setting forth his thoughts so that we can see what they are.
+
+I hope my readers will not be alarmed at this, and suppose that I am
+about to inflict long sermons upon them. I am not. I do hope, as I say,
+to teach them something; but those whom I succeed in so teaching will
+share in the delight it will give me to write about what I love most.
+
+As far as I can remember, I will tell how this Sunday-evening class
+began. I was sitting by Constance's bed. The fire was burning brightly,
+and the twilight had deepened so nearly into night that it was
+reflected back from the window, for the curtains had not yet been
+drawn. There was no light in the room but that of the fire.
+
+Now Constance was in the way of asking often what kind of day or night
+it was, for there never was a girl more a child of nature than she. Her
+heart seemed to respond at once to any and every mood of the world
+around her. To her the condition of air, earth, and sky was news, and
+news of poetic interest too. "What is it like?" she would often say,
+without any more definite shaping of the question. This same evening
+she said:
+
+"What is it like, papa?"
+
+"It is growing dark," I answered, "as you can see. It is a still
+evening, and what they call a black frost. The trees are standing as
+still as if they were carved out of stone, and would snap off
+everywhere if the wind were to blow. The ground is dark, and as hard as
+if it were of cast iron. A gloomy night rather, my dear. It looks as if
+there were something upon its mind that made it sullenly thoughtful;
+but the stars are coming out one after another overhead, and the sky
+will be all awake soon. A strange thing the life that goes on all
+night, is it not? The life of owlets, and mice, and beasts of prey, and
+bats, and stars," I said, with no very categorical arrangement, "and
+dreams, and flowers that don't go to sleep like the rest, but send out
+their scent all night long. Only those are gone now. There are no
+scents abroad, not even of the earth in such a frost as this."
+
+"Don't you think it looks sometimes, papa, as if God turned his back on
+the world, or went farther away from it for a while?"
+
+"Tell me a little more what you mean, Connie."
+
+"Well, this night now, this dark, frozen, lifeless night, which you
+have been describing to me, isn't like God at all--is it?"
+
+"No, it is not. I see what you mean now."
+
+"It is just as if he had gone away and said, 'Now you shall see what
+you can do without me.'
+
+"Something like that. But do you know that English people--at least I
+think so--enjoy the changeful weather of their country much more upon
+the whole than those who have fine weather constantly? You see it is
+not enough to satisfy God's goodness that he should give us all things
+richly to enjoy, but he must make us able to enjoy them as richly as he
+gives them. He has to consider not only the gift, but the receiver of
+the gift. He has to make us able to take the gift and make it our own,
+as well as to give us the gift. In fact, it is not real giving, with
+the full, that is, the divine, meaning of giving, without it. He has to
+give us to the gift as well as give the gift to us. Now for this, a
+break, an interruption is good, is invaluable, for then we begin to
+think about the thing, and do something in the matter ourselves. The
+wonder of God's teaching is that, in great part, he makes us not merely
+learn, but teach ourselves, and that is far grander than if he only
+made our minds as he makes our bodies."
+
+"I think I understand you, papa. For since I have been ill, you would
+wonder, if you could see into me, how even what you tell me about the
+world out of doors gives me more pleasure than I think I ever had when
+I could go about in it just as I liked."
+
+"It wouldn't do that, though, you know, if you hadn't had the other
+first. The pleasure you have comes as much from your memory as from my
+news."
+
+"I see that, papa."
+
+"Now can you tell me anything in history that confirms what I have been
+saying?"
+
+"I don't know anything about history, papa. The only thing that comes
+into my head is what you were saying yourself the other day about
+Milton's blindness."
+
+"Ah, yes. I had not thought of that. Do you know, I do believe that God
+wanted a grand poem from that man, and therefore blinded him that he
+might be able to write it. But he had first trained him up to the
+point--given him thirty years in which he had not to provide the bread
+of a single day, only to learn and think; then set him to teach boys;
+then placed him at Cromwell's side, in the midst of the tumultuous
+movement of public affairs, into which the late student entered with
+all his heart and soul; and then last of all he cast the veil of a
+divine darkness over him, sent him into a chamber far more retired than
+that in which he laboured at Cambridge, and set him like the
+nightingale to sing darkling. The blackness about him was just the
+great canvas which God gave him to cover with forms of light and music.
+Deep wells of memory burst upwards from below; the windows of heaven
+were opened from above; from both rushed the deluge of song which
+flooded his soul, and which he has poured out in a great river to us."
+
+"It was rather hard for poor Milton, though, wasn't it, papa?"
+
+"Wait till he says so, my dear. We are sometimes too ready with our
+sympathy, and think things a great deal worse than those who have to
+undergo them. Who would not be glad to be struck with _such_ blindness
+as Milton's?"
+
+"Those that do not care about his poetry, papa," answered Constance,
+with a deprecatory smile.
+
+"Well said, my Connie. And to such it never can come. But, if it please
+God, you will love Milton before you are about again. You can't love
+one you know nothing about."
+
+"I have tried to read him a little."
+
+"Yes, I daresay. You might as well talk of liking a man whose face you
+had never seen, because you did not approve of the back of his coat.
+But you and Milton together have led me away from a far grander
+instance of what we had been talking about. Are you tired, darling?"
+
+"Not the least, papa. You don't mind what I said about Milton?"
+
+"Not at all, my dear. I like your honesty. But I should mind very much
+if you thought, with your ignorance of Milton, that your judgment of
+him was more likely to be right than mine, with my knowledge of him."
+
+"O, papa! I am only sorry that I am not capable of appreciating him."
+
+"There you are wrong again. I think you are quite capable of
+appreciating him. But you cannot appreciate what you have never seen.
+You think of him as dry, and think you ought to be able to like dry
+things. Now he is not dry, and you ought not to be able to like dry
+things. You have a figure before you in your fancy, which is dry, and
+which you call Milton. But it is no more Milton than your dull-faced
+Dutch doll, which you called after her, was your merry Aunt Judy. But
+here comes your mamma; and I haven't said what I wanted to say yet."
+
+"But surely, husband, you can say it all the same," said my wife. "I
+will go away if you can't."
+
+"I can say it all the better, my love. Come and sit down here beside
+me. I was trying to show Connie--"
+
+"You did show me, papa."
+
+"Well, I was showing Connie that a gift has sometimes to be taken away
+again before we can know what it is worth, and so receive it right."
+
+Ethelwyn sighed. She was always more open to the mournful than the
+glad. Her heart had been dreadfully wrung in her youth.
+
+"And I was going on to give her the greatest instance of it in human
+history. As long as our Lord was with his disciples, they could not see
+him right: he was too near them. Too much light, too many words, too
+much revelation, blinds or stupefies. The Lord had been with them long
+enough. They loved him dearly, and yet often forgot his words almost as
+soon as he said them. He could not get it into them, for instance, that
+he had not come to be a king. Whatever he said, they shaped it over
+again after their own fancy; and their minds were so full of their own
+worldly notions of grandeur and command, that they could not receive
+into their souls the gift of God present before their eyes. Therefore
+he was taken away, that his Spirit, which was more himself than his
+bodily presence, might come into them--that they might receive the gift
+of God into their innermost being. After he had gone out of their
+sight, and they might look all around and down in the grave and up in
+the air, and not see him anywhere--when they thought they had lost him,
+he began to come to them again from the other side--from the inside.
+They found that the image of him which his presence with them had
+printed in light upon their souls, began to revive in the dark of his
+absence; and not that only, but that in looking at it without the
+overwhelming of his bodily presence, lines and forms and meanings began
+to dawn out of it which they had never seen before. And his words came
+back to them, no longer as they had received them, but as he meant
+them. The spirit of Christ filling their hearts and giving them new
+power, made them remember, by making them able to understand, all that
+he had said to them. They were then always saying to each other, 'You
+remember how;' whereas before, they had been always staring at each
+other with astonishment and something very near incredulity, while he
+spoke to them. So that after he had gone away, he was really nearer to
+them than he had been before. The meaning of anything is more than its
+visible presence. There is a soul in everything, and that soul is the
+meaning of it. The soul of the world and all its beauty has come nearer
+to you, my dear, just because you are separated from it for a time."
+
+"Thank you, dear papa. I do like to get a little sermon all to myself
+now and then. That is another good of being ill."
+
+"You don't mean me to have a share in it, then, Connie, do you?" said
+my wife, smiling at her daughter's pleasure.
+
+"O, mamma! I should have thought you knew all papa had got to say by
+this time. I daresay he has given you a thousand sermons all to
+yourself."
+
+"Then you suppose, Connie, that I came into the world with just a
+boxful of sermons, and after I had taken them all out there were no
+more. I should be sorry to think I should not have a good many new
+things to say by this time next year."
+
+"Well, papa, I wish I could be sure of knowing more next year."
+
+"Most people do learn, whether they will or not. But the kind of
+learning is very different in the two cases."
+
+"But I want to ask you one question, papa: do you think that we should
+not know Jesus better now if he were to come and let us see him--as he
+came to the disciples so long, long ago? I wish it were not so long
+ago."
+
+"As to the time, it makes no difference whether it was last year or two
+thousand years ago. The whole question is how much we understand, and
+understanding, obey him. And I do not think we should be any nearer
+that if he came amongst us bodily again. If we should, he would come. I
+believe we should be further off it."
+
+"Do you think, then," said Connie, in an almost despairing tone, as if
+I were the prophet of great evil, "that we shall never, never, never
+see him?"
+
+"That is _quite_ another thing, my Connie. That is the heart of my
+hopes by day and my dreams by night. To behold the face of Jesus seems
+to me the one thing to be desired. I do not know that it is to be
+prayed for; but I think it will be given us as the great bounty of God,
+so soon as ever we are capable of it. That sight of the face of Jesus
+is, I think, what is meant by his glorious appearing, but it will come
+as a consequence of his spirit in us, not as a cause of that spirit in
+us. The pure in heart shall see God. The seeing of him will be the sign
+that we are like him, for only by being like him can we see him as he
+is. All the time that he was with them, the disciples never saw him as
+he was. You must understand a man before you can see and read his face
+aright; and as the disciples did not understand our Lord's heart, they
+could neither see nor read his face aright. But when we shall be fit to
+look that man in the face, God only knows."
+
+"Then do you think, papa, that we, who have never seen him, could know
+him better than the disciples? I don't mean, of course, better than
+they knew him after he was taken away from them, but better than they
+knew him while he was still with them?"
+
+"Certainly I do, my dear."
+
+"O, papa! Is it possible? Why don't we all, then?"
+
+"Because we won't take the trouble; that is the reason."
+
+"O, what a grand thing to think! That would be worth living--worth
+being ill for. But how? how? Can't you help me? Mayn't one human being
+help another?"
+
+"It is the highest duty one human being owes to another. But whoever
+wants to learn must pray, and think, and, above all, obey--that is
+simply, do what Jesus says."
+
+There followed a little silence, and I could hear my child sobbing. And
+the tears stood in; my wife's eyes--tears of gladness to hear her
+daughter's sobs.
+
+"I will try, papa," Constance said at last. "But you _will_ help me?"
+
+"That I will, my love. I will help you in the best way I know; by
+trying to tell you what I have heard and learned about him--heard and
+learned of the Father, I hope and trust. It is coming near to the time
+when he was born;--but I have spoken quite as long as you are able to
+bear to-night."
+
+"No, no, papa. Do go on."
+
+"No, my dear; no more to-night. That would be to offend against the
+very truth I have been trying to set forth to you. But next Sunday--you
+have plenty to think about till then--I will talk to you about the baby
+Jesus; and perhaps I may find something more to help you by that time,
+besides what I have got to say now."
+
+"But," said my wife, "don't you think, Connie, this is too good to keep
+all to ourselves? Don't you think we ought to have Wynnie and Dora in?"
+
+"Yes, yes, mamma. Do let us have them in. And Harry and Charlie too."
+
+"I fear they are rather young yet," I said. "Perhaps it might do them
+harm."
+
+"It would be all the better for us to have them anyhow," said Ethelwyn,
+smiling.
+
+"How do you mean, my dear?"
+
+"Because you will say things more simply if you have them by you.
+Besides, you always say such things to children as delight grown
+people, though they could never get them out of you."
+
+It was a wife's speech, reader. Forgive me for writing it.
+
+"Well," I said, "I don't mind them coming in, but I don't promise to
+say anything directly to them. And you must let them go away the moment
+they wish it."
+
+"Certainly," answered my wife; and so the matter was arranged.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+A SUNDAY EVENING.
+
+
+When I went in to see Constance the next Sunday morning before going to
+church, I knew by her face that she was expecting the evening. I took
+care to get into no conversation with her during the day, that she
+might be quite fresh. In the evening, when I went into her room again
+with my Bible in my hand, I found all our little company assembled.
+There was a glorious fire, for it was very cold, and the little ones
+were seated on the rug before it, one on each side of their mother;
+Wynnie sat by the further side of the bed, for she always avoided any
+place or thing she thought another might like; and Dora sat by the
+further chimney-corner, leaving the space between the fire and my chair
+open that I might see and share the glow.
+
+"The wind is very high, papa," said Constance, as I seated myself
+beside her.
+
+"Yes, my dear. It has been blowing all day, and since sundown it has
+blown harder. Do you like the wind, Connie?"
+
+"I am afraid I do like it. When it roars like that in the chimneys, and
+shakes the windows with a great rush as if it _would_ get into the
+house and tear us to pieces, and then goes moaning away into the woods
+and grumbles about in them till it grows savage again, and rushes up at
+us with fresh fury, I am afraid I delight in it. I feel so safe in the
+very jaws of danger."
+
+"Why, you are quite poetic, Connie," said Wynnie.
+
+"Don't laugh at me, Wynnie. Mind I'm an invalid, and I can't bear to be
+laughed at," returned Connie, half laughing herself, and a little more
+than a quarter crying.
+
+Wynnie rose and kissed her, whispered something to her which made her
+laugh outright, and then sat down again.
+
+"But tell me, Connie," I said, "why you are _afraid_ you enjoy hearing
+the wind about the house."
+
+"Because it must be so dreadful for those that are out in it."
+
+"Perhaps not quite so bad as we think. You must not suppose that God
+has forgotten them, or cares less for them than for you because they
+are out in the wind."
+
+"But if we thought like that, papa," said Wynnie, "shouldn't we come to
+feel that their sufferings were none of our business?"
+
+"If our benevolence rests on the belief that God is less loving than
+we, it will come to a bad end somehow before long, Wynnie."
+
+"Of course, I could not think that," she returned.
+
+"Then your kindness would be such that you dared not, in God's name,
+think hopefully for those you could not help, lest you should,
+believing in his kindness, cease to help those whom you could help!
+Either God intended that there should be poverty and suffering, or he
+did not. If he did not intend it--for similar reasons to those for
+which he allows all sorts of evils--then there is nothing between but
+that we should sell everything that we have and give it away to the
+poor."
+
+"Then why don't we?" said Wynnie, looking truth itself in my face.
+
+"Because that is not God's way, and we should do no end of harm by so
+doing. We should make so many more of those who will not help
+themselves who will not be set free from themselves by rising above
+themselves. We are not to gratify our own benevolence at the expense of
+its object--not to save our own souls as we fancy, by putting other
+souls into more danger than God meant for them."
+
+"It sounds hard doctrine from your lips, papa," said Wynnie.
+
+"Many things will look hard in so many words, which yet will be found
+kindness itself when they are interpreted by a higher theory. If the
+one thing is to let people have everything they want, then of course
+everyone ought to be rich. I have no doubt such a man as we were
+reading of in the papers the other day, who saw his servant girl drown
+without making the least effort to save her, and then bemoaned the loss
+of her labour for the coming harvest, thinking himself ill-used in her
+death, would hug his own selfishness on hearing my words, and say, 'All
+right, parson! Every man for himself! I made my own money, and they may
+make theirs!' _You_ know that is not exactly the way I should think or
+act with regard to my neighbour. But if it were only that I have seen
+such noble characters cast in the mould of poverty, I should be
+compelled to regard poverty as one of God's powers in the world for
+raising the children of the kingdom, and to believe that it was not
+because it could not be helped that our Lord said, 'The poor ye have
+always with you.' But what I wanted to say was, that there can be no
+reason why Connie should not enjoy what God has given her, although he
+has not thought fit to give as much to everybody; and above all, that
+we shall not help those right whom God gives us to help, if we do not
+believe that God is caring for every one of them as much as he is
+caring for every one of us. There was once a baby born in a stable,
+because his poor mother could get no room in a decent house. Where she
+lay I can hardly think. They must have made a bed of hay and straw for
+her in the stall, for we know the baby's cradle was the manger. Had God
+forsaken them? or would they not have been more _comfortable_, if that
+was the main thing, somewhere else? Ah! if the disciples, who were
+being born about the same time of fisher-fathers and cottage-mothers,
+to get ready for him to call and teach by the time he should be thirty
+years of age--if they had only been old enough, and had known that he
+was coming--would they not have got everything ready for him? They
+would have clubbed their little savings together, and worked day and
+night, and some rich women would have helped them, and they would have
+dressed the baby in fine linen, and got him the richest room their
+money would get, and they would have made the gold that the wise men
+brought into a crown for his little head, and would have burnt the
+frankincense before him. And so our little manger-baby would have been
+taken away from us. No more the stable-born Saviour--no more the poor
+Son of God born for us all, as strong, as noble, as loving, as
+worshipful, as beautiful as he was poor! And we should not have learned
+that God does not care for money; that if he does not give more of it
+it is not that it is scarce with him, or that he is unkind, but that he
+does not value it himself. And if he sent his own son to be not merely
+brought up in the house of the carpenter of a little village, but to be
+born in the stable of a village inn, we need not suppose because a man
+sleeps under a haystack and is put in prison for it next day, that God
+does not care for him."
+
+"But why did Jesus come so poor, papa?"
+
+"That he might be just a human baby. That he might not be distinguished
+by this or by that accident of birth; that he might have nothing but a
+mother's love to welcome him, and so belong to everybody; that from the
+first he might show that the kingdom of God and the favour of God lie
+not in these external things at all--that the poorest little one, born
+in the meanest dwelling, or in none at all, is as much God's own and
+God's care as if he came in a royal chamber with colour and shine all
+about him. Had Jesus come amongst the rich, riches would have been more
+worshipped than ever. See how so many that count themselves good
+Christians honour possession and family and social rank, and I doubt
+hardly get rid of them when they are all swept away from them. The
+furthest most of such reach is to count Jesus an exception, and
+therefore not despise him. See how, even in the services of the church,
+as they call them, they will accumulate gorgeousness and cost. Had I my
+way, though I will never seek to rouse men's thoughts about such
+external things, I would never have any vessel used in the eucharist
+but wooden platters and wooden cups."
+
+"But are we not to serve him with our best?" said my wife.
+
+"Yes, with our very hearts and souls, with our wills, with our absolute
+being. But all external things should be in harmony with the spirit of
+his revelation. And if God chose that his Son should visit the earth in
+homely fashion, in homely fashion likewise should be everything that
+enforces and commemorates that revelation. All church-forms should be
+on the other side from show and expense. Let the money go to build
+decent houses for God's poor, not to give them his holy bread and wine
+out of silver and gold and precious stones--stealing from the
+significance of the _content_ by the meretricious grandeur of the
+_continent_. I would send all the church-plate to fight the devil with
+his own weapons in our overcrowded cities, and in our villages where
+the husbandmen are housed like swine, by giving them room to be clean
+and decent air from heaven to breathe. When the people find the clergy
+thus in earnest, they will follow them fast enough, and the money will
+come in like salt and oil upon the sacrifice. I would there were a few
+of our dignitaries that could think grandly about things, even as Jesus
+thought--even as God thought when he sent him. There are many of them
+willing to stand any amount of persecution about trifles: the same
+enthusiasm directed by high thoughts about the kingdom of heaven as
+within men and not around them, would redeem a vast region from that
+indifference which comes of judging the gospel of God by the church of
+Christ with its phylacteries and hems."
+
+"There is one thing," said Wynnie, after a pause, "that I have often
+thought about--why it was necessary for Jesus to come as a baby: he
+could not do anything for so long."
+
+"First, I would answer, Wynnie, that if you would tell me why it is
+necessary for all of us to come as babies, it would be less necessary
+for me to tell you why he came so: whatever was human must be his. But
+I would say next, Are you sure that he could not do anything for so
+long? Does a baby do nothing? Ask mamma there. Is it for nothing that
+the mother lifts up such heartfuls of thanks to God for the baby on her
+knee? Is it nothing that the baby opens such fountains of love in
+almost all the hearts around? Ah! you do not think how much every baby
+has to do with the saving of the world--the saving of it from
+selfishness, and folly, and greed. And for Jesus, was he not going to
+establish the reign of love in the earth? How could he do better than
+begin from babyhood? He had to lay hold of the heart of the world. How
+could he do better than begin with his mother's--the best one in it.
+Through his mother's love first, he grew into the world. It was first
+by the door of all the holy relations of the family that he entered the
+human world, laying hold of mother, father, brothers, sisters, all his
+friends; then by the door of labour, for he took his share of his
+father's work; then, when he was thirty years of age, by the door of
+teaching; by kind deeds, and sufferings, and through all by obedience
+unto the death. You must not think little of the grand thirty years
+wherein he got ready for the chief work to follow. You must not think
+that while he was thus preparing for his public ministrations, he was
+not all the time saving the world even by that which he was in the
+midst of it, ever laying hold of it more and more. These were things
+not so easy to tell. And you must remember that our records are very
+scanty. It is a small biography we have of a man who became--to say
+nothing more--the Man of the world--the Son of Man. No doubt it is
+enough, or God would have told us more; but surely we are not to
+suppose that there was nothing significant, nothing of saving power in
+that which we are not told.--Charlie, wouldn't you have liked to see
+the little baby Jesus?"
+
+"Yes, that I would. I would have given him my white rabbit with the
+pink eyes."
+
+"That is what the great painter Titian must have thought, Charlie; for
+he has painted him playing with a white rabbit,--not such a pretty one
+as yours."
+
+"I would have carried him about all day," said Dora, "as little Henny
+Parsons does her baby-brother."
+
+"Did he have any brother or sister to carry him about, papa?" asked
+Harry.
+
+"No, my boy; for he was the eldest. But you may be pretty sure he
+carried about his brothers and sisters that came after him."
+
+"Wouldn't he take care of them, just!" said Charlie.
+
+"I wish I had been one of them," said Constance.
+
+"You are one of them, my Connie. Now he is so great and so strong that
+he can carry father and mother and all of us in his bosom."
+
+Then we sung a child's hymn in praise of the God of little children,
+and the little ones went to bed. Constance was tired now, and we left
+her with Wynnie. We too went early to bed.
+
+About midnight my wife and I awoke together--at least neither knew
+which waked the other. The wind was still raving about the house, with
+lulls between its charges.
+
+"There's a child crying!" said my wife, starting up.
+
+I sat up too, and listened.
+
+"There is some creature," I granted.
+
+"It is an infant," insisted my wife. "It can't be either of the boys."
+
+I was out of bed in a moment, and my wife the same instant. We hurried
+on some of our clothes, going to the windows and listening as we did
+so. We seemed to hear the wailing through the loudest of the wind, and
+in the lulls were sure of it. But it grew fainter as we listened. The
+night was pitch dark. I got a lantern, and hurried out. I went round
+the house till I came under our bed-room windows, and there listened. I
+heard it, but not so clearly as before. I set out as well as I could
+judge in the direction of the sound. I could find nothing. My lantern
+lighted only a few yards around me, and the wind was so strong that it
+blew through every chink, and threatened momently to blow it out. My
+wife was by my side before I knew she was coming.
+
+"My dear!" I said, "it is not fit for you to be out."
+
+"It is as fit for me as for a child, anyhow," she said. "Do listen."
+
+It was certainly no time for expostulation. All the mother was awake in
+Ethelwyn's bosom. It would have been cruelty to make her go in, though
+she was indeed ill-fitted to encounter such a night-wind.
+
+Another wail reached us. It seemed to come from a thicket at one corner
+of the lawn. We hurried thither. Again a cry, and we knew we were much
+nearer to it. Searching and searching we went.
+
+"There it is!" Ethelwyn almost screamed, as the feeble light of the
+lantern fell on a dark bundle of something under a bush. She caught at
+it. It gave another pitiful wail--the poor baby of some tramp, rolled
+up in a dirty, ragged shawl, and tied round with a bit of string, as if
+it had been a parcel of clouts. She set off running with it to the
+house, and I followed, much fearing she would miss her way in the dark,
+and fall. I could hardly get up with her, so eager was she to save the
+child. She darted up to her own room, where the fire was not yet out.
+
+"Run to the kitchen, Harry, and get some hot water. Take the two jugs
+there--you can empty them in the sink: you won't know where to find
+anything. There will be plenty in the boiler."
+
+By the time I returned with the hot water, she had taken off the
+child's covering, and was sitting with it, wrapped in a blanket, before
+the fire. The little thing was cold as a stone, and now silent and
+motionless. We had found it just in time. Ethelwyn ordered me about as
+if I had been a nursemaid. I poured the hot water into a footbath.
+
+"Some cold water, Harry. You would boil the child."
+
+"You made me throw away the cold water," I said, laughing.
+
+"There's some in the bottles," she returned. "Make haste."
+
+I did try to make haste, but I could not be quick enough to satisfy
+Ethelwyn.
+
+"The child will be dead," she cried, "before we get it in the water."
+
+She had its rags off in a moment--there was very little to remove after
+the shawl. How white the little thing was, though dreadfully neglected!
+It was a girl--not more than a few weeks old, we agreed. Her little
+heart was still beating feebly; and as she was a well-made, apparently
+healthy infant, we had every hope of recovering her. And we were not
+disappointed. She began to move her little legs and arms with short,
+convulsive motions.
+
+"Do you know where the dairy is, Harry?" asked my wife, with no great
+compliment to my bumps of locality, which I had always flattered myself
+were beyond the average in development.
+
+"I think I do," I answered.
+
+"Could you tell which was this night's milk, now?"
+
+"There will be less cream on it," I answered.
+
+"Bring a little of that and some more hot water. I've got some sugar
+here. I wish we had a bottle."
+
+I executed her commands faithfully. By the time I returned the child
+was lying on her lap clean and dry--a fine baby I thought. Ethelwyn
+went on talking to her, and praising her as if she had not only been
+the finest specimen of mortality in the world, but her own child to
+boot. She got her to take a few spoonfuls of milk and water, and then
+the little thing fell fast asleep.
+
+Ethelwyn's nursing days were not so far gone by that she did not know
+where her baby's clothes were. She gave me the child, and going to a
+wardrobe in the room brought out some night-things, and put them on. I
+could not understand in the least why the sleeping darling must be
+indued with little chemise, and flannel, and nightgown, and I do not
+know what all, requiring a world of nice care, and a hundred turnings
+to and fro, now on its little stomach, now on its back, now sitting up,
+now lying down, when it would have slept just as well, and I venture to
+think much more comfortably, if laid in blankets and well covered over.
+But I had never ventured to interfere with any of my own children,
+devoutly believing up to this moment, though in a dim unquestioning
+way, that there must be some hidden feminine wisdom in the whole
+process; and now that I had begun to question it, I found that my
+opportunity had long gone by, if I had ever had one. And after all
+there may be some reason for it, though I confess I do strongly suspect
+that all these matters are so wonderfully complicated in order that the
+girl left in the woman may have her heart's content of playing with her
+doll; just as the woman hid in the girl expends no end of lovely
+affection upon the dull stupidity of wooden cheeks and a body of
+sawdust. But it was a delight to my heart to see how Ethelwyn could not
+be satisfied without treating the foundling in precisely the same
+fashion as one of her own. And if this was a necessary preparation for
+what, should follow, I would be the very last to complain of it.
+
+We went to bed again, and the forsaken child of some half-animal
+mother, now perhaps asleep in some filthy lodging for tramps, lay in my
+Ethelwyn's bosom. I loved her the more for it; though, I confess, it
+would have been very painful to me had she shown it possible for her to
+treat the baby otherwise, especially after what we had been talking
+about that same evening.
+
+So we had another child in the house, and nobody knew anything about it
+but ourselves two. The household had never been disturbed by all the
+going and coming. After everything had been done for her, we had a good
+laugh over the whole matter, and then Ethelwyn fell a-crying.
+
+"Pray for the poor thing, Harry," she sobbed, "before you come to bed."
+
+I knelt down, and said:
+
+"O Lord our Father, this is as much thy child and as certainly sent to
+us as if she had been born of us. Help us to keep the child for thee.
+Take thou care of thy own, and teach us what to do with her, and how to
+order our ways towards her."
+
+Then I said to Ethelwyn,
+
+"We will not say one word more about it tonight. You must try to go to
+sleep. I daresay the little thing will sleep till the morning, and I am
+sure I shall if she does. Good-night, my love. You are a true mother.
+Mind you go to sleep."
+
+"I am half asleep already, Harry. Good-night," she returned.
+
+I know nothing more about anything till I in the morning, except that I
+had a dream, which I have not made up my mind yet whether I shall tell
+or not. We slept soundly--God's baby and all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MY DREAM.
+
+
+I think I will tell the dream I had. I cannot well account for the
+beginning of it: the end will appear sufficiently explicable to those
+who are quite satisfied that they get rid of the mystery of a thing
+when they can associate it with something else with which they are
+familiar. Such do not care to see that the thing with which they
+associate it may be as mysterious as the other. For although use too
+often destroys marvel, it cannot destroy the marvellous. The origin of
+our thoughts is just as wonderful as the origin of our dreams.
+
+In my dream I found myself in a pleasant field full of daisies and
+white clover. The sun was setting. The wind was going one way, and the
+shadows another. I felt rather tired, I neither knew nor thought why.
+With an old man's prudence, I would not sit down upon the grass, but
+looked about for a more suitable seat. Then I saw, for often in our
+dreams there is an immediate response to our wishes, a long, rather
+narrow stone lying a few yards from me. I wondered how it could have
+come there, for there were no mountains or rocks near: the field was
+part of a level country. Carelessly, I sat down upon it astride, and
+watched the setting of the sun. Somehow I fancied that his light was
+more sorrowful than the light of the setting sun should be, and I began
+to feel very heavy at the heart. No sooner had the last brilliant spark
+of his light vanished, than I felt the stone under me begin to move.
+With the inactivity of a dreamer, however, I did not care to rise, but
+wondered only what would come next. My seat, after several strange
+tumbling motions, seemed to rise into the air a little way, and then I
+found that I was astride of a gaunt, bony horse--a skeleton horse
+almost, only he had a gray skin on him. He began, apparently with pain,
+as if his joints were all but too stiff to move, to go forward in the
+direction in which he found himself. I kept my seat. Indeed, I never
+thought of dismounting. I was going on to meet what might come. Slowly,
+feebly, trembling at every step, the strange steed went, and as he went
+his joints seemed to become less stiff, and he went a little faster.
+All at once I found that the pleasant field had vanished, and that we
+were on the borders of a moor. Straight forward the horse carried me,
+and the moor grew very rough, and he went stumbling dreadfully, but
+always recovering himself. Every moment it seemed as if he would fall
+to rise no more, but as often he found fresh footing. At length the
+surface became a little smoother, and he began a horrible canter which
+lasted till he reached a low, broken wall, over which he half walked,
+half fell into what was plainly an ancient neglected churchyard. The
+mounds were low and covered with rank grass. In some parts, hollows had
+taken the place of mounds. Gravestones lay in every position except the
+level or the upright, and broken masses of monuments were scattered
+about. My horse bore me into the midst of it, and there, slow and stiff
+as he had risen, he lay down again. Once more I was astride of a long
+narrow stone. And now I found that it was an ancient gravestone which I
+knew well in a certain Sussex churchyard, the top of it carved into the
+rough resemblance of a human skeleton--that of a man, tradition said,
+who had been killed by a serpent that came out of a bottomless pool in
+the next field. How long I sat there I do not know; but at last I saw
+the faint gray light of morning begin to appear in front of me. The
+horse of death had carried me eastward. The dawn grew over the top of a
+hill that here rose against the horizon. But it was a wild dreary
+dawn--a blot of gray first, which then stretched into long lines of
+dreary yellow and gray, looking more like a blasted and withered sunset
+than a fresh sunrise. And well it suited that waste, wide, deserted
+churchyard, if churchyard I ought to call it where no church was to be
+seen--only a vast hideous square of graves. Before me I noticed
+especially one old grave, the flat stone of which had broken in two and
+sunk in the middle. While I sat with my eyes fixed on this stone, it
+began to move; the crack in the middle closed, then widened again as
+the two halves of the stone were lifted up, and flung outward, like the
+two halves of a folding door. From the grave rose a little child,
+smiling such perfect contentment as if he had just come from kissing
+his mother. His little arms had flung the stones apart, and as he stood
+on the edge of the grave next to me, they remained outspread from the
+action for a moment, as if blessing the sleeping people. Then he came
+towards me with the same smile, and took my hand. I rose, and he led me
+away over another broken wall towards the hill that lay before us. And
+as we went the sun came nearer, the pale yellow bars flushed into
+orange and rosy red, till at length the edges of the clouds were swept
+with an agony of golden light, which even my dreamy eyes could not
+endure, and I awoke weeping for joy.
+
+This waking woke my wife, who said in some alarm:
+
+"What is the matter, husband?"
+
+So I told her my dream, and how in my sleep my gladness had overcome me.
+
+"It was this little darling that set you dreaming so," she said, and
+turning, put the baby in my arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE NEW BABY.
+
+
+I will not attempt to describe the astonishment of the members of our
+household, each in succession, as the news of the child spread. Charlie
+was heard shouting across the stable-yard to his brother:
+
+"Harry, Harry! Mamma has got a new baby. Isn't it jolly?"
+
+"Where did she get it?" cried Harry in return.
+
+"In the parsley-bed, I suppose," answered Charlie, and was nearer right
+than usual, for the information on which his conclusion was founded had
+no doubt been imparted as belonging to the history of the human race.
+
+But my reader can easily imagine the utter bewilderment of those of the
+family whose knowledge of human affairs would not allow of their
+curiosity being so easily satisfied as that of the boys. In them was
+exemplified that confusion of the intellectual being which is produced
+by the witness of incontestable truth to a thing incredible--in which
+case the probability always is, that the incredibility results from
+something in the mind of the hearer falsely associated with and
+disturbing the true perception of the thing to which witness is borne.
+
+Nor was the astonishment confined to the family, for it spread over the
+parish that Mrs. Walton had got another baby. And so, indeed, she had.
+And seldom has baby met with a more hearty welcome than this baby met
+with from everyone of our family. They hugged it first, and then asked
+questions. And that, I say, is the right way of receiving every good
+gift of God. Ask what questions you will, but when you see that the
+gift is a good one, make sure that you take it. There is plenty of time
+for you to ask questions afterwards. Then the better you love the gift,
+the more ready you will be to ask, and the more fearless in asking.
+
+The truth, however, soon became known. And then, strange to relate, we
+began to receive visits of condolence. O, that poor baby! how it was
+frowned upon, and how it had heads shaken over it, just because it was
+not Ethelwyn's baby! It could not help that, poor darling!
+
+"Of course, you'll give information to the police," said, I am sorry to
+say, one of my brethren in the neighbourhood, who had the misfortune to
+be a magistrate as well.
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+"Why! That they may discover the parents, to be sure."
+
+"Wouldn't it be as hard a matter to prove the parentage, as it would be
+easy to suspect it?" I asked. "And just think what it would be to give
+the baby to a woman who not only did not want her, but who was not her
+mother. But if her own mother came to claim her now, I don't say I
+would refuse her, but I should think twice about giving her up after
+she had once abandoned her for a whole night in the open air. In fact I
+don't want the parents."
+
+"But you don't want the child."
+
+"How do you know that?" I returned--rather rudely, I am afraid, for I
+am easily annoyed at anything that seems to me heartless--about
+children especially.
+
+"O! of course, if you want to have an orphan asylum of your own, no one
+has a right to interfere. But you ought to consider other people."
+
+"That is just what I thought I was doing," I answered; but he went on
+without heeding my reply--
+
+"We shall all be having babies left at our doors, and some of us are
+not so fond of them as you are. Remember, you are your brother's
+keeper."
+
+"And my sister's too," I answered. "And if the question lies between
+keeping a big, burly brother like you, and a tiny, wee sister like
+that, I venture to choose for myself."
+
+"She ought to go to the workhouse," said the magistrate--a friendly,
+good-natured man enough in ordinary--and rising, he took his hat and
+departed.
+
+
+This man had no children. So he was--or was not, so much to blame.
+Which? _I_ say the latter.
+
+Some of Ethelwyn's friends were no less positive about her duty in the
+affair. I happened to go into the drawing-room during the visit of one
+of them--Miss Bowdler.
+
+"But, my dear Mrs. Walton," she was saying, "you'll be having all the
+tramps in England leaving their babies at your door."
+
+"The better for the babies," interposed I, laughing.
+
+"But you don't think of your wife, Mr. Walton."
+
+"Don't I? I thought I did," I returned dryly.
+
+"Depend upon it, you'll repent it."
+
+"I hope I shall never repent of anything but what is bad."
+
+"Ah! but, really! it's not a thing to be made game of."
+
+"Certainly not. The baby shall be treated with all due respect in this
+house."
+
+"What a provoking man you are! You know what I mean well enough."
+
+"As well as I choose to know--certainly," I answered.
+
+This lady was one of my oldest parishioners, and took liberties for
+which she had no other justification, except indeed an unhesitating
+belief in the superior rectitude of whatever came into her own head can
+be counted as one. When she was gone, my wife turned to me with a
+half-comic, half-anxious look, and said:
+
+"But it would be rather alarming, Harry, if this were to get abroad,
+and we couldn't go out at the door in the morning without being in
+danger of stepping on a baby on the door-step."
+
+"You might as well have said, when you were going to be married, 'If
+God should send me twenty children, whatever should I do?' He who sent
+us this one can surely prevent any more from coming than he wants to
+come. All that we have to think of is to do right--not the consequences
+of doing right. But leaving all that aside, you must not suppose that
+wandering mothers have not even the attachment of animals to their
+offspring. There are not so many that are willing to part with babies
+as all that would come to. If you believe that God sent this one, that
+is enough for the present. If he should send another, we should know by
+that that we had to take it in."
+
+My wife said the baby was a beauty. I could see that she was a plump,
+well-to-do baby; and being by nature no particular lover of babies as
+babies--that is, feeling none of the inclination of mothers and nurses
+and elder sisters to eat them, or rather, perhaps, loving more for what
+I believed than what I saw--that was all I could pretend to discover.
+But even the aforementioned elderly parishioner was compelled to allow
+before three months were over that little Theodora--for we turned the
+name of my youngest daughter upside down for her--"was a proper child."
+To none, however, did she seem to bring so much delight as to our dear
+Constance. Oftener than not, when I went into her room, I found the
+sleepy, useless little thing lying beside her on the bed, and her
+staring at it with such loving eyes! How it began, I do not know, but
+it came at last to be called Connie's Dora, or Miss Connie's baby, all
+over the house, and nothing pleased Connie better. Not till she saw
+this did her old nurse take quite kindly to the infant; for she
+regarded her as an interloper, who had no right to the tenderness which
+was lavished upon her. But she had no sooner given in than the baby
+began to grow dear to her as well as to the rest. In fact, the house
+was ere long full of nurses. The staff included everyone but myself,
+who only occasionally, at the entreaty of some one or other of the
+younger ones, took her in my arms.
+
+But before she was three months old, anxious thoughts began to intrude,
+all centering round the question in what manner the child was to be
+brought up. Certainly there was time enough to think of this, as
+Ethelwyn constantly reminded me; but what made me anxious was that I
+could not discover the principle that ought to guide me. Now no one can
+tell how soon a principle in such a case will begin, even
+unconsciously, to operate; and the danger was that the moment when it
+ought to begin to operate would be long past before the principle was
+discovered, except I did what I could now to find it out. I had again
+and again to remind myself that there was no cause for anxiety; for
+that I might certainly claim the enlightenment which all who want to do
+right are sure to receive; but still I continued uneasy just from
+feeling a vacancy where a principle ought to have been.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+ANOTHER SUNDAY EVENING.
+
+
+During all this time Connie made no very perceptible progress--in the
+recovery of her bodily powers, I mean, for her heart and mind advanced
+remarkably. We held our Sunday-evening assemblies in her room pretty
+regularly, my occasional absence in the exercise of my duties alone
+interfering with them. In connection with one of these, I will show how
+I came at length to make up my mind as to what I would endeavour to
+keep before me as my object in the training of little Theodora, always
+remembering that my preparation might be used for a very different end
+from what I purposed. If my intention was right, the fact that it might
+be turned aside would not trouble me.
+
+We had spoken a good deal together about the infancy and childhood of
+Jesus, about the shepherds, and the wise men, and the star in the east,
+and the children of Bethlehem. I encouraged the thoughts of all the
+children to rest and brood upon the fragments that are given us, and,
+believing that the imagination is one of the most powerful of all the
+faculties for aiding the growth of truth in the mind, I would ask them
+questions as to what they thought he might have said or done in
+ordinary family occurrences, thus giving a reality in their minds to
+this part of his history, and trying to rouse in them a habit of
+referring their conduct to the standard of his. If we do not thus
+employ our imagination on sacred things, his example can be of no use
+to us except in exactly corresponding circumstances--and when can such
+occur from one end to another of our lives? The very effort to think
+how he would have done, is a wonderful purifier of the conscience, and,
+even if the conclusion arrived at should not be correct from lack of
+sufficient knowledge of his character and principles, it will be better
+than any that can be arrived at without this inquiry. Besides, the
+asking of such questions gave me good opportunity, through the answers
+they returned, of seeing what their notions of Jesus and of duty were,
+and thus of discovering how to help the dawn of the light in their
+growing minds. Nor let anyone fear that such employment of the divine
+gift of imagination will lead to foolish vagaries and useless
+inventions; while the object is to discover the right way--the
+truth--there is little danger of that. Besides, there I was to help
+hereby in the actual training of their imaginations to truth and
+wisdom. To aid in this, I told them some of the stories that were
+circulated about him in the early centuries of the church, but which
+the church has rejected as of no authority; and I showed them how some
+of them could not be true, because they were so unlike those words and
+actions which we had the best of reasons for receiving as true; and how
+one or two of them might be true--though, considering the company in
+which we found them, we could say nothing for certain concerning them.
+And such wise things as those children said sometimes! It is marvellous
+how children can reach the heart of the truth at once. Their utterances
+are sometimes entirely concordant with the results arrived at through
+years of thought by the earnest mind--results which no mind would ever
+arrive at save by virtue of the child-like in it.
+
+Well, then, upon this evening I read to them the story of the boy Jesus
+in the temple. Then I sought to make the story more real to them by
+dwelling a little on the growing fears of his parents as they went from
+group to group of their friends, tracing back the road towards
+Jerusalem and asking every fresh company they knew if they had seen
+their boy, till at length they were in great trouble when they could
+not find him even in Jerusalem. Then came the delight of his mother
+when she did find him at last, and his answer to what she said. Now,
+while I thus lingered over the simple story, my children had put many
+questions to me about Jesus being a boy, and not seeming to know things
+which, if he was God, he must have known, they thought. To some of
+these I had just to reply that I did not understand myself, and
+therefore could not teach them; to others, that I could explain them,
+but that they were not yet, some of them, old enough to receive and
+understand my explanation; while others I did my best to answer as
+simply as I could. But at this point we arrived at a question put by
+Wynnie, to answer which aright I considered of the greatest importance.
+Wynnie said:
+
+"That is just one of the things about Jesus that have always troubled
+me, papa."
+
+"What is, my dear?" I said; for although I thought I knew well enough
+what she meant, I wished her to set it forth in her own words, both for
+her own sake, and the sake of the others, who would probably understand
+the difficulty much better if she presented it herself.
+
+"I mean that he spoke to his mother--"
+
+"Why don't you say _mamma_, Wynnie?" said Charlie. "She was his own
+mamma, wasn't she, papa?"
+
+"Yes, my dear; but don't you know that the shoemaker's children down in
+the village always call their mamma _mother_?"
+
+"Yes; but they are shoemaker's children."
+
+"Well, Jesus was one of that class of people. He was the son of a
+carpenter. He called his mamma, _mother_. But, Charlie, _mother_ is the
+more beautiful word of the two, by a great deal, I think. _Lady_ is a
+very pretty word; but _woman_ is a very beautiful word. Just so with
+_mamma_ and _mother_. _Mamma_ is pretty, but _mother_ is beautiful."
+
+"Why don't we always say _mother_ then?"
+
+"Just because it is the most beautiful, and so we keep it for
+Sundays--that is, for the more solemn times of life. We don't want it
+to get common to us with too much use. We may think it as much as we
+like; thinking does not spoil it; but saying spoils many things, and
+especially beautiful words. Now we must let Wynnie finish what she was
+saying."
+
+"I was saying, papa, that I can't help feeling as if--I know it can't
+be true--but I feel as if Jesus spoke unkindly to his mother when he
+said that to her."
+
+I looked at the page and read the words, "How is it that ye sought me?
+wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" And I sat
+silent for a while.
+
+"Why don't you speak, papa?" said Harry.
+
+"I am sitting wondering at myself, Harry," I said. "Long after I was
+your age, Wynnie, I remember quite well that those words troubled me as
+they now trouble you. But when I read them over now, they seemed to me
+so lovely that I could hardly read them aloud. I can recall the fact
+that they troubled me, but the mode of the fact I scarcely can recall.
+I can hardly see now wherein lay the hurt or offence the words gave me.
+And why is that? Simply because I understand them now, and I did not
+understand them then. I took them as uttered with a tone of reproof;
+now I hear them as uttered with a tone of loving surprise. But really I
+cannot feel sure what it was that I did not like. And I am confident it
+is so with a great many things that we reject. We reject them simply
+because we do not understand them. Therefore, indeed, we cannot with
+truth be said to reject them at all. It is some false appearance that
+we reject. Some of the grandest things in the whole realm of truth look
+repellent to us, and we turn away from them, simply because we are
+not--to use a familiar phrase--we are not up to them. They appear to
+us, therefore, to be what they are not. Instruction sounds to the proud
+man like reproof; illumination comes on the vain man like scorn; the
+manifestation of a higher condition of motive and action than his own,
+falls on the self-esteeming like condemnation; but it is consciousness
+and conscience working together that produce this impression; the
+result is from the man himself, not from the higher source. From the
+truth comes the power, but the shape it assumes to the man is from the
+man himself."
+
+"You are quite beyond me now, papa," said Wynnie.
+
+"Well, my dear," I answered, "I will return to the words of the boy
+Jesus, instead of talking more about them; and when I have shown you
+what they mean, I think you will allow that that feeling you have about
+them is all and altogether an illusion."
+
+"There is one thing first," said Connie, "that I want to understand.
+You said the words of Jesus rather indicated surprise. But how could he
+be surprised at anything? If he was God, he must have known everything."
+
+"He tells us himself that he did not know everything. He says once that
+even _he_ did not know one thing--only the Father knew it."
+
+"But how could that be if he was God?"
+
+"My dear, that is one of the things that it seems to me impossible I
+should understand. Certainly I think his trial as a man would not have
+been perfect had he known everything. He too had to live by faith in
+the Father. And remember that for the Divine Sonship on earth perfect
+knowledge was not necessary, only perfect confidence, absolute
+obedience, utter holiness. There is a great tendency in our sinful
+natures to put knowledge and power on a level with goodness. It was one
+of the lessons of our Lord's life that they are not so; that the one
+grand thing in humanity is faith in God; that the highest in God is his
+truth, his goodness, his rightness. But if Jesus was a real man, and no
+mere appearance of a man, is it any wonder that, with a heart full to
+the brim of the love of God, he should be for a moment surprised that
+his mother, whom he loved so dearly, the best human being he knew,
+should not have taken it as a matter of course that if he was not with
+her, he must be doing something his Father wanted him to do? For this
+is just what his answer means. To turn it into the ordinary speech of
+our day, it is just this: 'Why did you look for me? Didn't you know
+that I must of course be doing something my Father had given me to do?'
+Just think of the quiet sweetness of confidence in this. And think what
+a life his must have been up to that twelfth year of his, that such an
+expostulation with his mother was justified. It must have had reference
+to a good many things that had passed before then, which ought to have
+been sufficient to make Mary conclude that her missing boy must be
+about God's business somewhere. If her heart had been as full of God
+and God's business as his, she would not have been in the least uneasy
+about him. And here is the lesson of his whole life: it was all his
+Father's business. The boy's mind and hands were full of it. The man's
+mind and hands were full of it. And the risen conqueror was full of it
+still. For the Father's business is everything, and includes all work
+that is worth doing. We may say in a full grand sense, that there is
+nothing but the Father and his business."
+
+"But we have so many things to do that are not his business," said
+Wynnie, with a sigh of oppression.
+
+"Not one, my darling. If anything is not his business, you not only
+have not to do it, but you ought not to do it. Your words come from the
+want of spiritual sight. We cannot see the truth in common things--the
+will of God in little everyday affairs, and that is how they become so
+irksome to us. Show a beautiful picture, one full of quiet imagination
+and deep thought, to a common-minded man; he will pass it by with some
+slight remark, thinking it very ordinary and commonplace. That is
+because he is commonplace. Because our minds are so commonplace, have
+so little of the divine imagination in them, therefore we do not
+recognise the spiritual meaning and worth, we do not perceive the
+beautiful will of God, in the things required of us, though they are
+full of it. But if we do them we shall thus make acquaintance with
+them, and come to see what is in them. The roughest kernel amongst them
+has a tree of life in its heart."
+
+"I wish he would tell me something to do," said Charlie. "Wouldn't I do
+it!"
+
+I made no reply, but waited for an opportunity which I was pretty sure
+was at hand, while I carried the matter a little further.
+
+"But look here, Wynnie; listen to this," I said, "'And he went down
+with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them.' Was that
+not doing his Father's business too? Was it not doing the business of
+his Father in heaven to honour his father and his mother, though he
+knew that his days would not be long in that land? Did not his whole
+teaching, his whole doing, rest on the relation of the Son to the
+Father and surely it was doing his Father's business then to obey his
+parents--to serve them, to be subject to them. It is true that the
+business God gives a man to do may be said to be the peculiar walk in
+life into which he is led, but that is only as distinguishing it from
+another man's peculiar business. God gives us all our business, and the
+business which is common to humanity is more peculiarly God's business
+than that which is one man's and not another's--because it lies nearer
+the root, and is essential. It does not matter whether a man is a
+farmer or a physician, but it greatly matters whether he is a good son,
+a good husband, and so on. O my children!" I said, "if the world could
+but be brought to believe--the world did I say?--if the best men in the
+world could only see, as God sees it, that service is in itself the
+noblest exercise of human powers, if they could see that God is the
+hardest worker of all, and that his nobility are those who do the most
+service, surely it would alter the whole aspect of the church. Menial
+offices, for instance, would soon cease to be talked of with that
+contempt which shows that there is no true recognition of the fact that
+the same principle runs through the highest duty and the lowest--that
+the lowest work which God gives a man to do must be in its nature
+noble, as certainly noble as the highest. This would destroy
+condescension, which is the rudeness, yes, impertinence, of the higher,
+as it would destroy insolence, which is the rudeness of the lower. He
+who recognised the dignity of his own lower office, would thereby
+recognise the superiority of the higher office, and would be the last
+either to envy or degrade it. He would see in it his own--only higher,
+only better, and revere it. But I am afraid I have wearied you, my
+children."
+
+"O, no, papa!" said the elder ones, while the little ones gaped and
+said nothing.
+
+"I know I am in danger of doing so when I come to speak upon this
+subject: it has such a hold of my heart and mind!--Now, Charlie, my
+boy, go to bed."
+
+But Charlie was very comfortable before the fire, on the rug, and did
+not want to go. First one shoulder went up, and then the other, and the
+corners of his mouth went down, as if to keep the balance true. He did
+not move to go. I gave him a few moments to recover himself, but as the
+black frost still endured, I thought it was time to hold up a mirror to
+him. When he was a very little boy, he was much in the habit of getting
+out of temper, and then as now, he made a face that was hideous to
+behold; and to cure him of this, I used to make him carry a little
+mirror about his neck, that the means might be always at hand of
+showing himself to him: it was a sort of artificial conscience which,
+by enabling him to see the picture of his own condition, which the face
+always is, was not unfrequently operative in rousing his real
+conscience, and making him ashamed of himself. But now the mirror I
+wanted to hold up to him was a past mood, in the light of which the
+present would show what it was.
+
+"Charlie," I said, "a little while ago you were wishing that God would
+give you something to do. And now when he does, you refuse at once,
+without even thinking about it."
+
+"How do you know that God wants me to go to bed?" said Charlie, with
+something of surly impertinence, which I did not meet with reproof at
+once because there was some sense along with the impudence.
+
+"I know that God wants you to do what I tell you, and to do it
+pleasantly. Do you think the boy Jesus would have put on such a face as
+that--I wish I had the little mirror to show it to you--when his mother
+told him it was time to go to bed?"
+
+And now Charlie began to look ashamed. I left the truth to work in him,
+because I saw it was working. Had I not seen that, I should have
+compelled him to go at once, that he might learn the majesty of law.
+But now that his own better self, the self enlightened of the light
+that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world, was working, time
+might well be afforded it to work its perfect work. I went on talking
+to the others. In the space of not more than one minute, he rose and
+came to me, looking both good and ashamed, and held up his face to kiss
+me, saying, "Goodnight, papa." I bade him good-night, and kissed him
+more tenderly than usual, that he might know that it was all right
+between us. I required no formal apology, no begging of my pardon, as
+some parents think right. It seemed enough to me that his heart was
+turned. It is a terrible thing to run the risk of changing humility
+into humiliation. Humiliation is one of the proudest conditions in the
+human world. When he felt that it would be a relief to say more
+explicitly, "Father, I have sinned," then let him say it; but not till
+then. To compel manifestation is one surest way to check feeling.
+
+My readers must not judge it silly to record a boy's unwillingness to
+go to bed. It is precisely the same kind of disobedience that some of
+them are guilty of themselves, and that in things not one whit more
+important than this, only those things happen to be _their_ wish at the
+moment, and not Charlie's, and so gain their superiority.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THEODORA'S DOOM.
+
+
+Try not to get weary, respected reader, of so much of what I am afraid
+most people will call tiresome preaching. But I know if you get
+anything practicable out of it, you will not be so soon tired of it. I
+promise you more story by and by. Only an old man, like an old horse,
+must be allowed to take very much his own way--go his own pace, I
+should have said. I am afraid there must be a little more of a similar
+sort in this chapter.
+
+On the Monday morning I set out to visit one or two people whom the
+severity of the weather had kept from church on the Sunday. The last
+severe frost, as it turned out, of the season, was possessing the
+earth. The sun was low in the wintry sky, and what seemed a very cold
+mist up in the air hid him from the earth. I was walking along a path
+in a field close by a hedge. A tree had been cut down, and lay upon the
+grass. A short distance from it lay its own figure marked out in
+hoar-frost. There alone was there any hoar-frost on the field; the rest
+was all of the loveliest tenderest green. I will not say the figure was
+such an exact resemblance as a photograph would have been; still it was
+an indubitable likeness. It appeared to the hasty glance that not a
+branch not a knot of the upper side of the tree at least was left
+unrepresented in shining and glittering whiteness upon the green grass.
+It was very pretty, and, I confess, at first, very puzzling. I walked
+on, meditating on the phenomenon, till at length I found out its cause.
+The hoar-frost had been all over the field in the morning. The sun had
+been shining for a time, and had melted the frost away, except where he
+could only cast a shadow. As he rose and rose, the shadow of the tree
+had shortened and come nearer and nearer to its original, growing more
+and more like as it came nearer, while the frost kept disappearing as
+the shadow withdrew its protection. When the shadow extended only to a
+little way from the tree, the clouds came and covered the sun, and
+there were no more shadows, only one great one of the clouds. Then the
+frost shone out in the shape of the vanished shadow. It lay at a little
+distance from the tree, because the tree having been only partially
+lopped, some great stumps of boughs held it up from the ground, and
+thus, when the sun was low, his light had shone a little way through
+beneath, as well as over the trunk.
+
+My reader needs not be afraid; I am not going to "moralise this
+spectacle with a thousand similes." I only tell it him as a very pretty
+phenomenon. But I confess I walked on moralising it. Any new thing in
+nature--I mean new in regard to my knowledge, of course--always made me
+happy; and I was full of the quiet pleasure it had given me and of the
+thoughts it had brought me, when, as I was getting over a stile, whom
+should I see in the next field, coming along the footpath, but the lady
+who had made herself so disagreeable about Theodora. The sight was
+rather a discord in my feeling at that moment; perhaps it would have
+been so at any moment. But I prepared myself to meet her in the
+strength of the good humour which nature had just bestowed upon me. For
+I fear the failing will go with me to the grave that I am very ready to
+be annoyed, even to the loss of my temper, at the urgings of ignoble
+prudence.
+
+"Good-morning, Miss Bowdler," I said.
+
+"Good-morning, Mr. Walton," she returned "I am afraid you thought me
+impertinent the other week; but you know by this time it is only my
+way."
+
+"As such I take it," I answered with a smile.
+
+She did not seem quite satisfied that I did not defend her from her own
+accusation; but as it was a just one, I could not do so. Therefore she
+went on to repeat the offence by way of justification.
+
+"It was all for Mrs. Walton's sake. You ought to consider her, Mr.
+Walton. She has quite enough to do with that dear Connie, who is likely
+to be an invalid all her days--too much to take the trouble of a
+beggar's brat as well."
+
+"Has Mrs. Walton been complaining to you about it, Miss Bowdler?" I
+asked.
+
+"O dear, no!" she answered. "She is far too good to complain of
+anything. That's just why her friends must look after her a bit, Mr.
+Walton."
+
+"Then I beg you won't speak disrespectfully of my little Theodora."
+
+"O dear me! no. Not at all. I don't speak disrespectfully of her."
+
+"Even amongst the class of which she comes, 'a beggar's brat' would be
+regarded as bad language."
+
+"I beg your pardon, I'm sure, Mr. Walton! If you _will_ take offence--"
+
+"I do take offence. And you know there is One who has given especial
+warning against offending the little ones."
+
+Miss Bowdler walked away in high displeasure--let me hope in conviction
+of sin as well. She did not appear in church for the next two Sundays.
+Then she came again. But she called very seldom at the Hall after this,
+and I believe my wife was not sorry.
+
+Now whether it came in any way from what that lady had said as to my
+wife's trouble with Constance and Theodora together, I can hardly tell;
+but, before I had reached home, I had at last got a glimpse of
+something like the right way, as it appeared to me, of bringing up
+Theodora. When I went into the house, I looked for my wife to have a
+talk with her about it; but, indeed, it always necessary to find her
+every time I got home. I found her in Connie's room as I had expected.
+Now although we were never in the habit of making mysteries of things
+in which there was no mystery, and talked openly before our children,
+and the more openly the older they grew, yet there were times when we
+wanted to have our talks quite alone, especially when we had not made
+up our minds about something. So I asked Ethelwyn to walk out with me.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't just this moment, husband," she answered. She was
+in the way of using that form of address, for she said it meant
+everything without saying it aloud. "I can't just this moment, for
+there is no one at liberty to stay with Connie."
+
+"O, never mind me, mamma," said Connie cheerfully. "Theodora will take
+care of me," and she looked fondly at the child, who was lying by her
+side fast asleep.
+
+"There!" I said. And both, looked up surprised, for neither knew what I
+meant. "I will tell you afterwards," I said, laughing. "Come along,
+Ethel."
+
+"You can ring the bell, you know, Connie, if you should want anything,
+or your baby should wake up and be troublesome. You won't want me long,
+will you, husband?"
+
+"I'm not sure about that. You must tell Susan to watch for the bell."
+
+Susan was the old nurse.
+
+Ethel put on her hooded cloak, and we went out together. I took her
+across to the field where I had seen the hoary shadow. The sun had not
+shone out, and I hoped it would be there to gladden her dear eyes as it
+had gladdened mine; but it was gone. The warmth of the sun, without his
+direct rays, had melted it away, as sacred influences will sometimes do
+with other shadows, without the mind knowing any more than the grass
+how the shadow departed. There, reader! I have got a bit of a moral in
+about it before you knew what I was doing. But I was sorry my wife
+could see it only through my eyes and words. Then I told her about Miss
+Bowdler, and what she had said. Ethel was very angry at her
+impertinence in speaking so to me. That was a wife's feeling, you know,
+and perhaps excusable in the first impression of the thing.
+
+"She seems to think," she said, "that she was sent into the world to
+keep other people right instead of herself. I am very glad you set her
+down, as the maids say."
+
+"O, I don't think there's much harm in her," I returned, which was easy
+generosity, seeing my wife was taking my part. "Indeed, I am not sure
+that we are not both considerably indebted to her; for it was after I
+met her that a thought came into my head as to how we ought to do with
+Theodora."
+
+"Still troubling yourself about that, husband?"
+
+"The longer the difficulty lasts, the more necessary is it that it
+should be met," I answered. "Our measures must begin sometime, and
+when, who can tell? We ought to have them in our heads, or they will
+never begin at all."
+
+"Well, I confess they are rather of a general nature at
+present--belonging to humanity rather than the individual, as you would
+say--consisting chiefly in washing, dressing, feeding, and apostrophe,
+varied with lullabying. But our hearts are a better place for our
+measures than our heads, aren't they?"
+
+"Certainly; I walk corrected. Only there's no fear about your heart.
+I'm not quite so sure about your head."
+
+"Thank you, husband. But with you for a head it doesn't matter, does
+it?"
+
+"I don't know that. People should always strengthen the weaker part,
+for no chain is stronger than its weakest link; no fortification
+stronger than its most assailable point. But, seriously, wife, I trust
+your head nearly, though not quite, as much as your heart. Now to go to
+business. There's one thing we have both made up our minds about--that
+there is to be no concealment with the child. God's fact must be known
+by her. It would be cruel to keep the truth from her, even if it were
+not sure to come upon her with a terrible shock some day. She must know
+from the first, by hearing it talked of--not by solemn and private
+communication--that she came out of the shrubbery. That's settled, is
+it not?"
+
+"Certainly. I see that to be the right way," responded Ethelwyn.
+
+"Now, are we bound to bring her up exactly as our own, or are we not?"
+
+"We are bound to do as well for her as for our own."
+
+"Assuredly. But if we brought her up just as our own, would that, the
+facts being as they are, be to do as well for her as for our own?"
+
+"I doubt it; for other people would not choose to receive her as we
+have done."
+
+"That is true. She would be continually reminded of her origin. Not
+that that in itself would be any evil; but as they would do it by
+excluding or neglecting her, or, still worse, by taking liberties with
+her, it would be a great pain. But keeping that out of view, would it
+be good for herself, knowing what she will know, to be thus brought up?
+Would it not be kinder to bring her up in a way that would make it
+easier for her to relieve the gratitude which I trust she will feel,
+not for our sakes--I hope we are above doing anything for the sake of
+the gratitude which will be given for it, and which is so often far
+beyond the worth of the thing done--"
+
+  "Alas! the gratitude of men
+  Hath oftener left me mourning,"
+
+said Ethel.
+
+"Ah! you understand that now, my Ethel!"
+
+"Yes, thank you, I do."
+
+"But we must wish for gratitude for others' sake, though we may be
+willing to go without it for our own. Indeed, gratitude is often just
+as painful as Wordsworth there represents it. It makes us so ashamed;
+makes us think how much more we _might_ have done; how lovely a thing
+it is to give in return for such common gifts as ours; how needy the
+man or woman must be in whom a trifle awakes so much emotion."
+
+"Yes; but we must not in justice think that it is merely that our
+little doing seems great to them: it is the kindness shown them
+therein, for which, often, they are more grateful than for the gift,
+though they can't show the difference in their thanks."
+
+"And, indeed, are not aware of it themselves, though it is so. And yet,
+the same remarks hold good about the kindness as about the gift. But to
+return to Theodora. If we put her in a way of life that would be
+recognisant of whence she came, and how she had been brought thence,
+might it not be better for her? Would it not be building on the truth?
+Would she not be happier for it?"
+
+
+"You are putting general propositions, while all the time you have
+something particular and definite in your own mind; and that is not
+fair to my place in the conference," said Ethel. "In fact, you think
+you are trying to approach me wisely, in order to persuade, I will not
+say _wheedle_, me into something. It's a good thing you have the
+harmlessness of the dove, Harry, for you've got the other thing."
+
+"Well, then, I will be as plain as ever I can be, only premising that
+what you call the cunning of the serpent--"
+
+"Wisdom, Harry, not cunning."
+
+"Is only that I like to give my arguments before my proposition. But
+here it is--bare and defenceless, only--let me warn you--with a whole
+battery behind it: it is, to bring up little Theodora as a servant to
+Constance."
+
+My wife laughed.
+
+"Well," she said, "for one who says so much about not thinking of the
+morrow, you do look rather far forward."
+
+"Not with any anxiety, however, if only I know that I am doing right."
+
+"But just think: the child is about three months old."
+
+"Well; Connie will be none the worse that she is being trained for her.
+I don't say that she is to commence her duties at once."
+
+"But Connie may be at the head of a house of her own long before that."
+
+"The training won't be lost to the child though. But I much fear, my
+love, that Connie will never be herself again. There is no sign of it.
+And Turner does not give much hope."
+
+"O Harry, Harry, don't say so! I can't bear it. To think of the darling
+child lying like that all her life!"
+
+"It is sad, indeed; but no such awful misfortune surely, Ethel. Haven't
+you seen, as well as I, that the growth of that child's nature since
+her accident has been marvellous? Ten times rather would I have her
+lying there such as she is, than have her well and strong and silly,
+with her bonnets inside instead of outside her head."
+
+"Yes, but she needn't have been like that. Wynnie never will."
+
+"Well, but God does all things not only well, but best, absolutely
+best. But just think what it would be in any circumstances to have a
+maid that had begun to wait upon her from the first days that she was
+able to toddle after something to fetch it for her."
+
+"Won't it be like making a slave of her?"
+
+"Won't it be like giving her a divine freedom from the first? The lack
+of service is the ruin of humanity."
+
+"But we can't train her then like one of our own."
+
+"Why not? Could we not give her all the love and all the teaching?"
+
+"Because it would not be fair to give her the education of a lady, and
+then make a servant of her."
+
+"You forget that the service would be part of her training from the
+first; and she would know no change of position in it. When we tell her
+that she was found in the shrubbery, we will add that we think God sent
+her to take care of Constance. I do not believe myself that you can
+have perfect service except from a lady. Do not forget the true notion
+of service as the essence of Christianity, yea, of divinity. It is not
+education that unfits for service: it is the want of it."
+
+"Well, I know that the reading girls I have had, have, as a rule,
+served me worse than the rest."
+
+"Would you have called one of those girls educated? Or even if they had
+been educated, as any of them might well have been, better than
+nine-tenths of the girls that go to boarding-schools, you must remember
+that they had never been taught service--the highest accomplishment of
+all. To that everything aids, when any true feeling of it is there. But
+for service of this high sort, the education must begin with the
+beginning of the dawn of will. How often have you wished that you had
+servants who would believe in you, and serve you with the same truth
+with which you regarded them! The servants born in a man's house in the
+old times were more like his children than his servants. Here is a
+chance for you, as it were of a servant born in your own house. Connie
+loves the child: the child will love Connie, and find her delight in
+serving her like a little cherub. Not one of the maids to whom you have
+referred had ever been taught to think service other than an
+unavoidable necessity, the end of life being to serve yourself, not to
+serve others; and hence most of them would escape from it by any
+marriage almost that they had a chance of making. I don't say all
+servants are like that; but I do think that most of them are. I know
+very well that most mistresses are as much to blame for this result as
+the servants are; but we are not talking about them. Servants nowadays
+despise work, and yet are forced to do it--a most degrading condition
+to be in. But they would not be in any better condition if delivered
+from the work. The lady who despises work is in as bad a condition as
+they are. The only way to set them free is to get them to regard
+service not only as their duty, but as therefore honourable, and
+besides and beyond this, in its own nature divine. In America, the very
+name of servant is repudiated as inconsistent with human dignity. There
+is _no_ dignity but of service. How different the whole notion of
+training is now from what it was in the middle ages! Service was
+honourable then. No doubt we have made progress as a whole, but in some
+things we have degenerated sadly. The first thing taught then was how
+to serve. No man could rise to the honour of knighthood without
+service. A nobleman's son even had to wait on his father, or to go into
+the family of another nobleman, and wait upon him as a page, standing
+behind his chair at dinner. This was an honour. No notion of
+degradation was in it. It was a necessary step to higher honour. And
+what was the next higher honour? To be set free from service? No. To
+serve in the harder service of the field; to be a squire to some noble
+knight; to tend his horse, to clean his armour, to see that every rivet
+was sound, every buckle true, every strap strong; to ride behind him,
+and carry his spear, and if more than one attacked him, to rush to his
+aid. This service was the more honourable because it was harder, and
+was the next step to higher honour yet. And what was this higher
+honour? That of knighthood. Wherein did this knighthood consist? The
+very word means simply _service_. And for what was the knight thus
+waited upon by his squire? That he might be free to do as he pleased?
+No, but that he might be free to be the servant of all. By being a
+squire first, the servant of one, he learned to rise to the higher
+rank, that of servant of all. His horse was tended, this armour
+observed, his sword and spear and shield held to his hand, that he
+might have no trouble looking after himself, but might be free, strong,
+unwearied, to shoot like an arrow to the rescue of any and every one
+who needed his ready aid. There was a grand heart of Christianity in
+that old chivalry, notwithstanding all its abuses which must be no more
+laid to its charge than the burning of Jews and heretics to
+Christianity. It was the lack of it, not the presence of it that
+occasioned the abuses that coexisted with it. Train our Theodora as a
+holy child-servant, and there will be no need to restrain any impulse
+of wise affection from pouring itself forth upon her. My firm belief is
+that we should then love and honour her far more than if we made her
+just like one of our own."
+
+"But what if she should turn out utterly unfit for it?"
+
+"Ah! then would come an obstacle. But it will not come till that
+discovery is made."
+
+"But if we should be going wrong all the time?"
+
+"Now, there comes the kind of care that never troubles me, and which I
+so strongly object to. It won't hurt her anyhow. And we ought always to
+act upon the ideal; it is the only safe ground of action. When that
+which contradicts and resists, and would ruin our ideal, opposes us,
+then we must take measures; but not till then can we take measures, or
+know what measures it may be necessary to take. But the ideal itself is
+the only thing worth striving after. Remember what our Lord himself
+said: 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven
+is perfect.'"
+
+"Well, I will think about it, Harry. There is time enough."
+
+"Plenty. No time only not to think about it. The more you think about
+it the better. If a thing be a good thing, the more you think about it
+the better it will look; for its real nature will go on coming out and
+showing itself. I cannot doubt that you will soon see how good it is."
+
+We then went home. It was only two days after that my wife said to me--
+
+"I am more than reconciled to your plan, husband. It seems to me
+delightful."
+
+When we reentered Connie's room, we found that her baby had just waked,
+and she had managed to get one arm under her, and was trying to comfort
+her, for she was crying.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+A SPRING CHAPTER.
+
+
+More especially now in my old age, I find myself "to a lingering motion
+bound." I would, if I might, tell a tale day by day, hour by hour,
+following the movement of the year in its sweet change of seasons. This
+may not be, but I will indulge myself now so far as to call this a
+spring chapter, and so pass to the summer, when my reader will see why
+I have called my story "The Seaboard Parish."
+
+I was out one day amongst my people, and I found two precious things:
+one, a lovely little fact, the other a lovely little primrose. This was
+a pinched, dwarfish thing, for the spring was but a baby herself, and
+so could not mother more than a brave-hearted weakling. The frost lay
+all about it under the hedge, but its rough leaves kept it just warm
+enough, and hardly. Now, I should never have pulled the little darling;
+it would have seemed a kind of small sacrilege committed on the church
+of nature, seeing she had but this one; only with my sickly cub at
+home, I felt justified in ravening like a beast of prey. I even went so
+far in my greed as to dig up the little plant with my fingers, and bear
+it, leaves and all, with a lump of earth about it to keep it alive,
+home to my little woman--a present from the outside world which she
+loved so much. And as I went there dawned upon me the recollection of a
+little mirror in which, if I could find it, she would see it still more
+lovely than in a direct looking at itself. So I set myself to find it;
+for it lay in fragments in the drawers and cabinets of my memory. And
+before I got home I had found all the pieces and put them together; and
+then it was a lovely little sonnet which a friend of mine had written
+and allowed me to see many years before. I was in the way of writing
+verses myself; but I should have been proud to have written this one. I
+never could have done that. Yet, as far as I knew, it had never seen
+the light through the windows of print. It was with some difficulty
+that I got it all right; but I thought I had succeeded very nearly, if
+not absolutely, and I said it over and over, till I was sure I should
+not spoil its music or its meaning by halting in the delivery of it.
+
+"Look here, my Connie, what I have brought you," I said.
+
+She held out her two white, half-transparent hands, took it as if it
+had been a human baby and looked at it lovingly till the tears came in
+her eyes. She would have made a tender picture, as she then lay, with
+her two hands up, holding the little beauty before her eyes. Then I
+said what I have already written about the mirror, and repeated the
+sonnet to her. Here it is, and my readers will owe me gratitude for it.
+My friend had found the snowdrop in February, and in frost. Indeed he
+told me that there was a tolerable sprinkling of snow upon the ground:
+
+  "I know not what among the grass thou art,
+    Thy nature, nor thy substance, fairest flower,
+    Nor what to other eyes thou hast of power
+  To send thine image through them to the heart;
+  But when I push the frosty leaves apart,
+    And see thee hiding in thy wintry bower,
+    Thou growest up within me from that hour,
+  And through the snow I with the spring depart.
+
+  I have no words. But fragrant is the breath,
+    Pale Beauty, of thy second life within.
+  There is a wind that cometh for thy death,
+    But thou a life immortal dost begin,
+  Where, in one soul, which is thy heaven, shall dwell
+  Thy spirit, beautiful Unspeakable!"
+
+"Will you say it again, papa?" said Connie; "I do not quite understand
+it."
+
+"I will, my dear. But I will do something better as well. I will go and
+write it out for you, as soon as I have given you something else that I
+have brought."
+
+"Thank you, papa. And please write it in your best Sunday hand, that I
+may read it quite easily."
+
+I promised, and repeated the poem.
+
+"I understand it a little better," she said; "but the meaning is just
+like the primrose itself, hidden up in its green leaves. When you give
+it me in writing, I will push them apart and find it. Now, tell me what
+else you have brought me."
+
+I was greatly pleased with the resemblance the child saw between the
+plant and the sonnet; but I did not say anything in praise; I only
+expressed satisfaction. Before I began my story, Wynnie came in and sat
+down with us.
+
+"I have been to see Miss Aylmer, this morning," I said. "She feels the
+loss of her mother very much, poor thing."
+
+"How old was she, papa?" asked Connie.
+
+"She was over ninety, my dear; but she had forgotten how much herself,
+and her daughter could not be sure about it. She was a peculiar old
+lady, you know. She once reproved me for inadvertently putting my hat
+on the tablecloth. 'Mr. Shafton,' she said, 'was one of the old school;
+he would never have done that. I don't know what the world is coming
+to.'"
+
+My two girls laughed at the idea of their papa being reproved for bad
+manners.
+
+"What did you say, papa?" they asked.
+
+"I begged her pardon, and lifted it instantly. 'O, it's all right now,
+my dear,' she said, 'when you've taken it up again. But I like good
+manners, though I live in a cottage now.'"
+
+"Had she seen better days, then?" asked Wynnie.
+
+"She was a farmer's daughter, and a farmer's widow. I suppose the chief
+difference in her mode of life was that she lived in a cottage instead
+of a good-sized farmhouse."
+
+"But what is the story you have to tell us?"
+
+"I'm coming to that when you have done with your questions."
+
+"We have done, papa."
+
+"After talking awhile, during which she went bustling a little about
+the cottage, in order to hide her feelings, as I thought, for she has a
+good deal of her mother's sense of dignity about her,--but I want your
+mother to hear the story. Run and fetch her, Wynnie."
+
+"O, do make haste, Wynnie," said Connie.
+
+When Ethelwyn came, I went on.
+
+"Miss Aylmer was bustling a little about the cottage, putting things to
+rights. All at once she gave a cry of surprise, and said, 'Here it is,
+at last!' She had taken up a stuff dress of her mother's, and was
+holding it in one hand, while with the other she drew from the
+pocket--what do you think?"
+
+Various guesses were hazarded.
+
+"No, no--nothing like it. I know you _could_ never guess. Therefore it
+would not be fair to keep you trying. A great iron horseshoe. The old
+woman of ninety years had in the pocket of the dress that she was
+wearing at the very moment when she died, for her death was sudden, an
+iron horseshoe."
+
+"What did it mean? Could her daughter explain it?"
+
+"That she proceeded at once to do. 'Do you remember, sir,' she said,
+'how that horseshoe used to hang on a nail over the chimneypiece?' 'I
+do remember having observed it there,' I answered; 'for once when I
+took notice of it, I said to your mother, laughing, "I hope you are not
+afraid of witches, Mrs. Aylmer?" And she looked a little offended, and
+assured me to the contrary.' 'Well,' her daughter went on, 'about three
+months ago, I missed it. My mother would not tell me anything about it.
+And here it is! I can hardly think she can have carried it about all
+that time without me finding it out, but I don't know. Here it is,
+anyhow. Perhaps when she felt death drawing nearer, she took it from
+somewhere where she had hidden it, and put it in her pocket. If I had
+found it in time, I would have put it in her coffin.' 'But why?' I
+asked. 'Do tell me the story about it, if you know it.' 'I know it
+quite well, for she told me all about it once. It is the shoe of a
+favourite mare of my father's--one he used to ride when he went
+courting my mother. My grandfather did not like to have a young man
+coming about the house, and so he came after the old folks were gone to
+bed. But he had a long way to come, and he rode that mare. She had to
+go over some stones to get to the stable, and my mother used to spread
+straw there, for it was under the window of my grandfather's room, that
+her shoes mightn't make a noise and wake him. And that's one of the
+shoes,' she said, holding it up to me. 'When the mare died, my mother
+begged my father for the one off her near forefoot, where she had so
+often stood and patted her neck when my father was mounted to ride home
+again.'"
+
+"But it was very naughty of her, wasn't it," said Wynnie, "to do that
+without her father's knowledge?"
+
+"I don't say it was right, my dear. But in looking at what is wrong, we
+ought to look for the beginning of the wrong; and possibly we might
+find that in this case farther back. If, for instance, a father isn't a
+father, we must not be too hard in blaming the child for not being a
+child. The father's part has to come first, and teach the child's part.
+Now, if I might guess from what I know of the old lady, in whom
+probably it was much softened, her father was very possibly a hard,
+unreasoning, and unreasonable man--such that it scarcely ever came into
+the daughter's head that she had anything else to do with regard to him
+than beware of the consequences of letting him know that she had a
+lover. The whole thing, I allow, was wrong; but I suspect the father
+was first to blame, and far more to blame than the daughter. And that
+is the more likely from the high character of the old dame, and the
+romantic way in which she clung to the memory of the courtship. A true
+heart only does not grow old. And I have, therefore, no doubt that the
+marriage was a happy one. Besides, I daresay it was very much the
+custom of the country where they were, and that makes some difference."
+
+"Well, I'm sure, papa, you wouldn't like any of us to go and do like
+that," said Wynnie.
+
+"Assuredly not, my dear," I answered, laughing. "Nor have I any fear of
+it. But shall I tell you what I think would be one of the chief things
+to trouble me if you did?"
+
+"If you like, papa. But it sounds rather dreadful to hear such an _if_"
+said Wynnie.
+
+"It would be to think how much I had failed of being such a father to
+you as I ought to be, and as I wished to be, if it should prove at all
+possible for you to do such a thing."
+
+"It's too dreadful to talk about, papa," said Wynnie; and the subject
+was dropped.
+
+She was a strange child, this Wynnie of ours. Whereas most people are
+in danger of thinking themselves in the right, or insisting that they
+are whether they think so or not, she was always thinking herself in
+the wrong. Nay more, she always expected to find herself in the wrong.
+If the perpetrator of any mischief was inquired after, she always
+looked into her own bosom to see whether she could not with justice
+aver that she was the doer of the deed. I believe she felt at that
+moment as if she had been deceiving me already, and deserved to be
+driven out of the house. This came of an over-sensitiveness,
+accompanied by a general dissatisfaction with herself, which was not
+upheld by a sufficient faith in the divine sympathy, or sufficient
+confidence of final purification. She never spared herself; and if she
+was a little severe on the younger ones sometimes, no one was yet more
+indulgent to them. She would eat all their hard crusts for them, always
+give them the best and take the worst for herself. If there was any
+part in the dish that she was helping that she thought nobody would
+like, she invariably assigned it to her own share. It looked like a
+determined self-mortification sometimes; but that was not it. She did
+not care for her own comfort enough to feel it any mortification;
+though I observed that when her mother or I helped her to anything
+nice, she ate it with as much relish as the youngest of the party. And
+her sweet smile was always ready to meet the least kindness that was
+offered her. Her obedience was perfect, and had been so for very many
+years, as far as we could see. Indeed, not since she was the merest
+child had there been any contest between us. Now, of course, there was
+no demand of obedience: she was simply the best earthly friend that her
+father and mother had. It often caused me some passing anxiety to think
+that her temperament, as well as her devotion to her home, might cause
+her great suffering some day; but when those thoughts came, I just gave
+her to God to take care of. Her mother sometimes said to her that she
+would make an excellent wife for a poor man. She would brighten up
+greatly at this, taking it for a compliment of the best sort. And she
+did not forget it, as the sequel will show. She would choose to sit
+with one candle lit when there were two on the table, wasting her eyes
+to save the candles. "Which will you have for dinner to-day, papa,
+roast beef or boiled?" she asked me once, when her mother was too
+unwell to attend to the housekeeping. And when I replied that I would
+have whichever she liked best--"The boiled beef lasts longest, I
+think," she said. Yet she was not only as liberal and kind as any to
+the poor, but she was, which is rarer, and perhaps more important for
+the final formation of a character, carefully just to everyone with
+whom she had any dealings. Her sense of law was very strong. Law with
+her was something absolute, and not to be questioned. In her childhood
+there was one lady to whom for years she showed a decided aversion, and
+we could not understand it, for it was the most inoffensive Miss
+Boulderstone. When she was nearly grown up, one of us happening to
+allude to the fact, she volunteered an explanation. Miss Boulderstone
+had happened to call one day when Wynnie, then between three and four
+was in disgrace--_in the corner_, in fact. Miss Boulderstone interceded
+for her; and this was the whole front of her offending.
+
+"I _was_ so angry!" she said. "'As if my papa did not know best when I
+ought to come out of the corner!' I said to myself. And I couldn't bear
+her for ever so long after that."
+
+Miss Boulderstone, however, though not very interesting, was quite a
+favourite before she died. She left Wynnie--for she and her brother
+were the last of their race--a death's-head watch, which had been in
+the family she did not know how long. I think it is as old as Queen
+Elizabeth's time. I took it to London to a skilful man, and had it as
+well repaired as its age would admit of; and it has gone ever since,
+though not with the greatest accuracy; for what could be expected of an
+old death's-head, the most transitory thing in creation? Wynnie wears
+it to this day, and wouldn't part with it for the best watch in the
+world.
+
+I tell the reader all this about my daughter that he may be the more
+able to understand what will follow in due time. He will think that as
+yet my story has been nothing but promises. Let him only hope that I
+will fulfil them, and I shall be content.
+
+Mr. Boulderstone did not long outlive his sister. Though the old
+couple, for they were rather old before they died, if, indeed, they
+were not born old, which I strongly suspect, being the last of a
+decaying family that had not left the land on which they were born for
+a great many generations--though the old people had not, of what the
+French call sentiments, one between them, they were yet capable of a
+stronger and, I had almost said, more romantic attachment, than many
+couples who have married from love; for the lady's sole trouble in
+dying was what her brother _would_ do without her; and from the day of
+her death, he grew more and more dull and seemingly stupid. Nothing
+gave him any pleasure but having Wynnie to dinner with him. I knew that
+it must be very dull for her, but she went often, and I never heard her
+complain of it, though she certainly did look fagged--not _bored_,
+observe, but fagged--showing that she had been exerting herself to meet
+the difficulties of the situation. When the good man died, we found
+that he had left all his money in my hands, in trust for the poor of
+the parish, to be applied in any way I thought best. This involved me
+in much perplexity, for nothing is more difficult than to make money
+useful to the poor. But I was very glad of it, notwithstanding.
+
+My own means were not so large as my readers may think. The property my
+wife brought me was much encumbered. With the help of her private
+fortune, and the income of several years (not my income from the
+church, it may be as well to say), I succeeded in clearing off the
+encumbrances. But even then there remained much to be done, if I would
+be the good steward that was not to be ashamed at his Lord's coming.
+First of all there were many cottages to be built for the labourers on
+the estate. If the farmers would not, or could not, help, I must do it;
+for to provide decent dwellings for them, was clearly one of the divine
+conditions in the righteous tenure of property, whatever the human
+might be; for it was not for myself alone, or for myself chiefly, that
+this property was given to me; it was for those who lived upon it.
+Therefore I laid out what money I could, not only in getting all the
+land clearly in its right relation to its owner, but in doing the best
+I could for those attached to it who could not help themselves. And
+when I hint to my reader that I had some conscience in paying my
+curate, though, as they had no children, they did not require so much
+as I should otherwise have felt compelled to give them, he will easily
+see that as my family grew up I could not have so much to give away of
+my own as I should have liked. Therefore this trust of the good Mr.
+Boulderstone was the more acceptable to me.
+
+One word more ere I finish this chapter.--I should not like my friends
+to think that I had got tired of our Christmas gatherings, because I
+have made no mention of one this year. It had been pretermitted for the
+first time, because of my daughter's illness. It was much easier to
+give them now than when I lived at the vicarage, for there was plenty
+of room in the old hall. But my curate, Mr. Weir, still held a similar
+gathering there every Easter.
+
+Another one word more about him. Some may wonder why I have not
+mentioned him or my sister, especially in connection with Connie's
+accident. The fact was, that he had taken, or rather I had given him, a
+long holiday. Martha had had several disappointing illnesses, and her
+general health had suffered so much in consequence that there was even
+some fear of her lungs, and a winter in the south of France had been
+strongly recommended. Upon this I came in with more than a
+recommendation, and insisted that they should go. They had started in
+the beginning of October, and had not returned up to the time of which
+I am now about to write--somewhere in the beginning of the month of
+April. But my sister was now almost quite well, and I was not sorry to
+think that I should soon have a little more leisure for such small
+literary pursuits as I delighted in--to my own enrichment, and
+consequently to the good of my parishioners and friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+AN IMPORTANT LETTER.
+
+
+It was, then, in the beginning of April that I received one morning an
+epistle from an old college friend of mine, with whom I had renewed my
+acquaintance of late, through the pleasure which he was kind enough to
+say he had derived from reading a little book of mine upon the relation
+of the mind of St. Paul to the gospel story. His name was Shepherd--a
+good name for a clergyman. In his case both Christian name and
+patronymic might remind him well of his duty. David Shepherd ought to
+be a good clergyman.
+
+As soon as I had read the letter, I went with it open in my hand to
+find my wife.
+
+"Here is Shepherd," I said, "with a clerical sore-throat, and forced to
+give up his duty for a whole summer. He writes to ask me whether, as he
+understands I have a curate as good as myself--that is what the old
+fellow says--it might not suit me to take my family to his place for
+the summer. He assures me I should like it, and that it would do us all
+good. His house, he says, is large enough to hold us, and he knows I
+should not like to be without duty wherever I was. And so on Read the
+letter for yourself, and turn it over in your mind. Weir will come back
+so fresh and active that it will be no oppression to him to take the
+whole of the duty here. I will run and ask Turner whether it would be
+safe to move Connie, and whether the sea-air would be good for her."
+
+"One would think you were only twenty, husband--you make up your mind
+so quickly, and are in such a hurry."
+
+The fact was, a vision of the sea had rushed in upon me. It was many
+years since I had seen the sea, and the thought of looking on it once
+more, in its most glorious show, the Atlantic itself, with nothing
+between us and America, but the round of the ridgy water, had excited
+me so that my wife's reproof, if reproof it was, was quite necessary to
+bring me to my usually quiet and sober senses. I laughed, begged old
+grannie's pardon, and set off to see Turner notwithstanding, leaving
+her to read and ponder Shepherd's letter.
+
+"What do you think, Turner?" I said, and told him the case. He looked
+rather grave.
+
+"When would you think of going?" he asked.
+
+"About the beginning of June."
+
+"Nearly two months," he said, thoughtfully. "And Miss Connie was not
+the worse for getting on the sofa yesterday?"
+
+"The better, I do think."
+
+"Has she had any increase of pain since?"
+
+"None, I quite believe; for I questioned her as to that."
+
+He thought again. He was a careful man, although young.
+
+"It is a long journey."
+
+"She could make it by easy stages."
+
+"It would certainly do her good to breathe the sea-air and have such a
+thorough change in every way--if only it could be managed without
+fatigue and suffering. I think, if you can get her up every day between
+this and that, we shall be justified in trying it at least. The sooner
+you get her out of doors the better too; but the weather is scarcely
+fit for that yet."
+
+"A good deal will depend on how she is inclined, I suppose."
+
+"Yes. But in her case you must not mind that too much. An invalid's
+instincts as to eating and drinking are more to be depended upon than
+those of a healthy person; but it is not so, I think with regard to
+anything involving effort. That she must sometimes be urged to. She
+must not judge that by inclination. I have had, in my short practice,
+two patients, who considered themselves _bedlars_, as you will find the
+common people in the part you are going to, call them--bedridden, that
+is. One of them I persuaded to make the attempt to rise, and although
+her sense of inability was anything but feigned, and she will be a
+sufferer to the end of her days, yet she goes about the house without
+much inconvenience, and I suspect is not only physically but morally
+the better for it. The other would not consent to try, and I believe
+lies there still."
+
+"The will has more to do with most things than people generally
+suppose," I said. "Could you manage, now, do you think, supposing we
+resolve to make the experiment, to accompany us the first stage or two?"
+
+"It is very likely I could. Only you must not depend upon me. I cannot
+tell beforehand. You yourself would teach me that I must not be a
+respecter of persons, you know."
+
+I returned to my wife. She was in Connie's room.
+
+"Well, my dear," I said, "what do you think of it?"
+
+"Of what?" she asked.
+
+"Why, of Shepherd's letter, of course," I answered.
+
+"I've been ordering the dinner since, Harry."
+
+"The dinner!" I returned with some show of contempt, for I knew my wife
+was only teasing me. "What's the dinner to the Atlantic?"
+
+"What do you mean by the Atlantic, papa?" said Connie, from whose
+roguish eyes I could see that her mother had told her all about it, and
+that _she_ was not disinclined to get up, if only she could.
+
+"The Atlantic, my dear, is the name given to that portion of the waters
+of the globe which divides Europe from America. I will fetch you the
+Universal Gazetteer, if you would like to consult it on the subject."
+
+"O papa!" laughed Connie; "you know what I mean."
+
+"Yes; and you know what I mean too, you squirrel!"
+
+"But do you really mean, papa," she said "that you will take me to the
+Atlantic?"
+
+"If you will only oblige me by getting Well enough to go as soon as
+possible."
+
+The poor child half rose on her elbow, but sank back again with a moan,
+which I took for a cry of pain. I was beside her in a moment.
+
+"My darling! You have hurt yourself!"
+
+"O no, papa. I felt for the moment as if I could get up if I liked. But
+I soon found that I hadn't any back or legs. O! what a plague I am to
+you!"
+
+"On the contrary, you are the nicest plaything in the world, Connie.
+One always knows where to find you."
+
+She half laughed and half cried, and the two halves made a very
+bewitching whole.
+
+"But," I went on, "I mean to try whether my dolly won't bear moving.
+One thing is clear, I can't go without it. Do you think you could be
+got on the sofa to-day without hurting you?"
+
+"I am sure I could, papa. I feel better today than I have felt yet.
+Mamma, do send for Susan, and get me up before dinner."
+
+When I went in after a couple of hours or so, I found her lying on the
+conch, propped up with pillows. She lay looking out of the window on
+the lawn at the back of the house. A smile hovered about her bloodless
+lips, and the blue of her eyes, though very gray, looked sunny. Her
+white face showed the whiter because her dark brown hair was all about
+it. We had had to cut her hair, but it had grown to her neck again.
+
+"I have been trying to count the daisies on the lawn," she said.
+
+"What a sharp sight you must have, child!"
+
+"I see them all as clear as if they were enamelled on that table before
+me."
+
+I was not so anxious to get rid of the daisies as some people are.
+Neither did I keep the grass quite so close shaved.
+
+"But," she went on, "I could not count them, for it gave me the fidgets
+in my feet."
+
+"You don't say so!" I exclaimed.
+
+She looked at me with some surprise, but concluding that I was only
+making a little of my mild fun at her expense, she laughed.
+
+"Yes. Isn't it a wonderful fact?" she said.
+
+"It is a fact, my dear, that I feel ready to go on my knees and thank
+God for. I may be wrong, but I take it as a sign that you are beginning
+to recover a little. But we mustn't make too much of it, lest I should
+be mistaken," I added, checking myself, for I feared exciting her too
+much.
+
+But she lay very still; only the tears rose slowly and lay shimmering
+in her eyes. After about five minutes, during which we were both
+silent,--
+
+"O papa!" she said, "to think of ever walking out with you again, and
+feeling the wind on my face! I can hardly believe it possible."
+
+"It is so mild, I think you might have half that pleasure at once," I
+answered..
+
+And I opened the window, let the spring air gently move her hair for
+one moment, and then shut it again. Connie breathed deep, and said
+after a little pause,--
+
+"I had no idea how delightful it was. To think that I have been in the
+way of breathing that every moment for so many years and never thought
+about it!"
+
+"It is not always just like that in this climate. But I ought not to
+have made that remark when I wanted to make this other: that I suspect
+we shall find some day that the loss of the human paradise consists
+chiefly in the closing of the human eyes; that at least far more of it
+than people think remains about us still, only we are so filled with
+foolish desires and evil cares, that we cannot see or hear, cannot even
+smell or taste the pleasant things round about us. We have need to pray
+in regard to the right receiving of the things of the senses even,
+'Lord, open thou our hearts to understand thy word;' for each of these
+things is as certainly a word of God as Jesus is the Word of God. He
+has made nothing in vain. All is for our teaching. Shall I tell you
+what such a breath of fresh air makes me think of?"
+
+"It comes to me," said Connie, "like forgiveness when I was a little
+girl and was naughty. I used to feel just like that."
+
+"It is the same kind of thing I feel," I said--"as if life from the
+Spirit of God were coming into my soul: I think of the wind that
+bloweth where it listeth. Wind and spirit are the same word in the
+Greek; and the Latin word _spirit_ comes even nearer to what we are
+saying, for it is the wind as _breathed_. And now, Connie, I will tell
+you--and you will see how I am growing able to talk to you like quite
+an old friend--what put me in such a delight with Mr. Shepherd's letter
+and so exposed me to be teased by mamma and you. As I read it, there
+rose up before me a vision of one sight of the sea which I had when I
+was a young man, long before I saw your mamma. I had gone out for a
+walk along some high downs. But I ought to tell you that I had been
+working rather hard at Cambridge, and the life seemed to be all gone
+out of me. Though my holidays had come, they did not feel quite like
+holidays--not as holidays used to feel when I was a boy. Even when
+walking along those downs with the scents of sixteen grasses or so in
+my brain, like a melody with the odour of the earth for the
+accompaniment upon which it floated, and with just enough of wind to
+stir them up and set them in motion, I could not feel at all. I
+remembered something of what I had used to feel in such places, but
+instead of believing in that, I doubted now whether it had not been all
+a trick that I played myself--a fancied pleasure only. I was walking
+along, then, with the sea behind me. It was a warm, cloudy day--I had
+had no sunshine since I came out. All at once I turned--I don't know
+why. There lay the gray sea, but not as I had seen it last, not all
+gray. It was dotted, spotted, and splashed all over with drops, pools,
+and lakes of light, of all shades of depth, from a light shimmer of
+tremulous gray, through a half light that turned the prevailing lead
+colour into translucent green that seemed to grow out of its
+depths--through this, I say, to brilliant light, deepening and
+deepening till my very soul was stung by the triumph of the intensity
+of its molten silver. There was no sun upon me. But there were breaks
+in the clouds over the sea, through which, the air being filled with
+vapour, I could see the long lines of the sun-rays descending on the
+waters like rain--so like a rain of light that the water seemed to
+plash up in light under their fall. I questioned the past no more; the
+present seized upon me, and I knew that the past was true, and that
+nature was more lovely, more awful in her loveliness than I could
+grasp. It was a lonely place: I fell on my knees, and worshipped the
+God that made the glory and my soul."
+
+While I spoke Connie's tears had been flowing quietly.
+
+"And mamma and I were making fun while you were seeing such things as
+those!" she said pitifully.
+
+"You didn't hurt them one bit, my darling--neither mamma nor you. If I
+had been the least cross about it, as I should have been when I was as
+young as at the time of which I was thinking, that would have ruined
+the vision entirely. But your merriment only made me enjoy it more.
+And, my Connie, I hope you will see the Atlantic before long; and if
+one vision should come as brilliant as that, we shall be fortunate
+indeed, if we went all the way to the west to see that only."
+
+"O papa! I dare hardly think of it--it is too delightful. But do you
+think we shall really go?"
+
+"I do. Here comes your mamma--I am going to say to Shepherd, my dear,
+that I will take his parish in hand, and if I cannot, after all, go
+myself, will find some one, so that he need be in no anxiety from the
+uncertainty which must hang over our movements even till the experiment
+itself is made."
+
+"Very well, husband. I am quite satisfied."
+
+And as I watched Connie, I saw that hope and expectation did much to
+prepare her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+CONNIE'S DREAM.
+
+
+Mr. Turner, being a good mechanic as well as surgeon, proceeded to
+invent, and with his own hands in a great measure construct, a kind of
+litter, which, with a water-bed laid upon it, could be placed in our
+own carriage for Connie to lie upon, and from that lifted, without
+disturbing her, and placed in a similar manner in the railway carriage.
+He had laid Connie repeatedly upon it before he was satisfied that the
+arrangement of the springs, &c., was successful. But at length she
+declared that it was perfect, and that she would not mind being carried
+across the Arabian desert on a camel's back with that under her.
+
+As the season advanced, she continued to improve. I shall never forget
+the first time she was carried out upon the lawn. If you can imagine an
+infant coming into the world capable of the observation and delight of
+a child of eight or ten, you will have some idea of how Connie received
+the new impressions of everything around her. They were almost too much
+for her at first, however. She who had been used to scamper about like
+a wild thing on a pony, found the delight of a breath of wind almost
+more than she could bear. After she was laid down she closed her eyes,
+and the smile that flickered about her mouth was of a sort that
+harmonised entirely with the two great tears that crept softly out from
+under her eyelids, and sank, rather than ran, down her cheeks. She lay
+so that she faced a rich tract of gently receding upland, plentifully
+wooded to the horizon's edge, and through the wood peeped the white and
+red houses of a little hamlet, with the square tower of its church just
+rising above the trees. A kind of frame was made to the whole picture
+by the nearer trees of our own woods, through an opening in which,
+evidently made or left for its sake, the distant prospect was visible.
+It was a morning in early summer, when the leaves were not quite
+full-grown but almost, and their green was shining and pure as the blue
+of the sky, when the air had no touch of bitterness or of lassitude,
+but was thoroughly warm, and yet filled the lungs with the reviving as
+of a draught of cold water. We had fastened the carriage umbrella to
+the sofa, so that it should shade her perfectly without obscuring her
+prospect; and behind this we all crept, leaving her to come to herself
+without being looked at, for emotion is a shy and sacred thing and
+should be tenderly hidden by those who are near. The bees kept very
+_beesy_ all about us. To see one huge fellow, as big as three ordinary
+ones with pieces of red and yellow about him, as if he were the beadle
+of all bee-dom, and overgrown in consequence--to see him, I say, down
+in a little tuft of white clover, rolling about in it, hardly able to
+move for fatness, yet bumming away as if his business was to express
+the delight of the whole creation--was a sight! Then there were the
+butterflies, so light that they seemed to tumble up into the air, and
+get down again with difficulty. They bewildered me with their
+inscrutable variations of purpose. "If I could but see once, for an
+hour, into the mind of a butterfly," I thought, "it would be to me
+worth all the natural history I ever read. If I could but see why he
+changes his mind so often and so suddenly--what he saw about that
+flower to make him seek it--then why, on a nearer approach, he should
+decline further acquaintance with it, and go rocking away through the
+air, to do the same fifty times over again--it would give me an insight
+into all animal and vegetable life that ages of study could not bring
+me up to." I was thinking all this behind my daughter's umbrella, while
+a lark, whose body had melted quite away in the heavenly spaces, was
+scattering bright beads of ringing melody straight down upon our heads;
+while a cock was crowing like a clarion from the home-farm, as if in
+defiance of the golden glitter of his silent brother on the roof of the
+stable; while a little stream that scampered down the same slope as the
+lawn lay upon, from a well in the stable-yard, mingled its sweet
+undertone of contentment with the jubilation of the lark and the
+business-like hum of the bees; and while white clouds floated in the
+majesty of silence across the blue deeps of the heavens. The air was so
+full of life and reviving, that it seemed like the crude substance that
+God might take to make babies' souls of--only the very simile smells of
+materialism, and therefore I do not like it.
+
+"Papa," said Connie at length, and I was beside her in a moment. Her
+face looked almost glorified with delight: there was a hush of that awe
+upon it which is perhaps one of the deepest kinds of delight. She put
+out her thin white hand, took hold of a button of my coat, drew me down
+towards her, and said in a whisper:
+
+"Don't you think God is here, papa?"
+
+"Yes, I do, my darling," I answered.
+
+"Doesn't _he_ enjoy this?"
+
+"Yes, my dear. He wouldn't make us enjoy it if he did not enjoy it. It
+would be to deceive us to make us glad and blessed, while our Father
+did not care about it, or how it came to us. At least it would amount
+to making us no longer his children."
+
+"I am so glad you think so. I do. And I shall enjoy it so much more
+now."
+
+She could hardly finish her sentence, but burst out sobbing so that I
+was afraid she would hurt herself. I saw, however, that it was best to
+leave her to quiet herself, and motioned to the rest to keep back and
+let her recover as she could. The emotion passed off in a summer
+shower, and when I went round once more, her face was shining just like
+a wet landscape after the sun has come out and Nature has begun to make
+gentle game of her own past sorrows. In a little while, she was
+merry--merrier, notwithstanding her weakness, than I think I had ever
+seen her before.
+
+"Look at that comical sparrow," she said. "Look how he cocks his head
+first on one side and then on the other. Does he want us to see him? Is
+he bumptious, or what?"
+
+"I hardly know, my dear. I think sparrows are very like schoolboys; and
+I suspect that if we understood the one class thoroughly, we should
+understand the other. But I confess I do not yet understand either."
+
+"Perhaps you will when Charlie and Harry are old enough to go to
+school," said Connie.
+
+"It is my only chance of making any true acquaintance with the
+sparrows," I answered. "Look at them now," I exclaimed, as a little
+crowd of them suddenly appeared where only one had stood a moment
+before, and exploded in objurgation and general unintelligible
+excitement. After some obscure fluttering of wings and pecking, they
+all vanished except two, which walked about in a dignified manner,
+trying apparently to seem quite unconscious each of the other's
+presence.
+
+"I think it was a political meeting of some sort," said Connie,
+laughing merrily.
+
+"Well, they have this advantage over us," I answered, "that they get
+through their business whatever it may be, with considerably greater
+expedition than we get through ours."
+
+A short silence followed, during which Connie lay contemplating
+everything.
+
+"What do you think we girls are like, then, papa?" she asked at length.
+"Don't say you don't know, now."
+
+"I ought to know something more about you than I do about schoolboys.
+And I think I do know a little about girls--not much though. They
+puzzle me a good deal sometimes. I know what a great-hearted woman is,
+Connie."
+
+"You can't help doing that, papa," interrupted Connie, adding with her
+old roguishness, "You mustn't pass yourself off for very knowing for
+that. By the time Wynnie is quite grown up, your skill will be tried."
+
+"I hope I shall understand her then, and you too, Connie."
+
+A shadow, just like the shadow of one of those white clouds above us,
+passed over her face, and she said, trying to smile:
+
+"I shall never grow up, papa. If I live, I shall only be a girl at
+best--a creature you can't understand."
+
+"On the contrary, Connie, I think I understand you almost as well as
+mamma. But there isn't so much to understand yet, you know, as there
+will be."
+
+Her merriment returned.
+
+"Tell me what girls are like, then, or I shall sulk all day because you
+say there isn't so much in me as in mamma."
+
+"Well, I think, if the boys are like sparrows, the girls are like
+swallows. Did you ever watch them before rain, Connie, skimming about
+over the lawn as if it were water, low towards its surface, but never
+alighting? You never see them grubbing after worms. Nothing less than
+things with wings like themselves will satisfy them. They will be
+obliged to the earth only for a little mud to build themselves nests
+with. For the rest, they live in the air, and on the creatures of the
+air. And then, when they fancy the air begins to be uncivil, sending
+little shoots of cold through their warm feathers, they vanish. They
+won't stand it. They're off to a warmer climate, and you never know
+till you find they're not there any more. There, Connie!"
+
+"I don't know, papa, whether you are making game of us or not. If you
+are not, then I wish all you say were quite true of us. If you are then
+I think it is not quite like you to be satirical."
+
+"I am no believer in satire, Connie. And I didn't mean any. The
+swallows are lovely creatures, and there would be no harm if the girls
+were a little steadier than the swallows. Further satire than that I am
+innocent of."
+
+"I don't mind that much, papa. Only I'm steady enough, and no thanks to
+me for it," she added with a sigh.
+
+"Connie," I said, "it's all for the sake of your wings that you're kept
+in your nest."
+
+She did not stay out long this first day, for the life the air gave her
+soon tired her weak body. But the next morning she was brighter and
+better, and longing to get up and go out again. When she was once more
+laid on her couch on the lawn, in the midst of the world of light and
+busy-ness, in which the light was the busiest of all, she said to me:
+
+"Papa, I had such a strange dream last night: shall I tell it you?"
+
+"If you please, my dear. I am very fond of dreams that have any sense
+in them--or even of any that have good nonsense in them. I woke this
+morning, saying to myself, 'Dante, the poet, must have been a
+respectable man, for he was permitted by the council of Florence to
+carry the Nicene Creed and the Multiplication Table in his coat of
+arms.' Now tell me your dream."
+
+Connie laughed. All the household tried to make Connie laugh, and
+generally succeeded. It was quite a triumph to Charlie or Harry, and
+was sure to be recounted with glee at the next meal, when he succeeded
+in making Connie laugh.
+
+"Mine wasn't a dream to make me laugh. It was too dreadful at first,
+and too delightful afterwards. I suppose it was getting out for the
+first time yesterday that made me dream it. I thought I was lying quite
+still, without breathing even, with my hands straight down by my sides
+and my eyes closed. I did not choose to open them, for I knew that if I
+did I should see nothing but the inside of the lid of my coffin. I did
+not mind it much at first, for I was very quiet, and not uncomfortable.
+Everything was as silent as it should be, for I was ten feet and a half
+under the surface of the earth in the churchyard. Old Sogers was not
+far from me on one side, and that was a comfort; only there was a thick
+wall of earth between. But as the time went on, I began to get
+uncomfortable. I could not help thinking how long I should have to wait
+for the resurrection. Somehow I had forgotten all that you teach us
+about that. Perhaps it was a punishment--the dream--for forgetting it."
+
+"Silly child! Your dream is far better than your reflections."
+
+"Well, I'll go on with my dream. I lay a long time till I got very
+tired, and wanted to get up, O, so much! But still I lay, and although
+I tried, I could not move hand or foot. At last I burst out crying. I
+was ashamed of crying in my coffin, but I couldn't bear it any longer.
+I thought I was quite disgraced, for everybody was expected to be
+perfectly quiet and patient down there. But the moment I began to cry,
+I heard a sound. And when I listened it was the sound of spades and
+pickaxes. It went on and on, and came nearer and nearer. And then--it
+was so strange--I was dreadfully frightened at the idea of the light
+and the wind, and of the people seeing me in my coffin and my
+night-dress, and tried to persuade myself that it was somebody else
+they were digging for, or that they were only going to lay another
+coffin over mine. And I thought that if it was you, papa, I shouldn't
+mind how long I lay there, for I shouldn't feel a bit lonely, even
+though we could not speak a word to each other all the time. But the
+sounds came on, nearer and nearer, and at last a pickaxe struck, with a
+blow that jarred me all through, upon the lid of the coffin, right over
+my head.
+
+"'Here she is, poor thing!' I heard a sweet voice say.
+
+"'I'm so glad we've found her,' said another voice.
+
+"'She couldn't bear it any longer,' said a third more pitiful voice
+than either of the others. 'I heard her first,' it went on. 'I was away
+up in Orion, when I thought I heard a woman crying that oughtn't to be
+crying. And I stopped and listened. And I heard her again. Then I knew
+that it was one of the buried ones, and that she had been buried long
+enough, and was ready for the resurrection. So as any business can wait
+except that, I flew here and there till I fell in with the rest of you.'
+
+"I think, papa, that this must have been because of what you were
+saying the other evening about the mysticism of St. Paul; that while he
+defended with all his might the actual resurrection of Christ and the
+resurrection of those he came to save, he used it as meaning something
+more yet, as a symbol for our coming out of the death of sin into the
+life of truth. Isn't that right, papa?"
+
+"Yes, my dear; I believe so. But I want to hear your dream first, and
+then your way of accounting for it."
+
+"There isn't much more of it now."
+
+"There must be the best of it."
+
+"Yes; I allow that. Well, while they spoke--it was a wonderfully clear
+and connected dream: I never had one like it for that, or for anything
+else--they were clearing away the earth and stones from the top of my
+coffin. And I lay trembling and expecting to be looked at, like a thing
+in a box as I was, every moment. But they lifted me, coffin and all,
+out of the grave, for I felt the motion of it up. Then they set it
+down, and I heard them taking the lid off. But after the lid was off,
+it did not seem to make much difference to me. I could not open my
+eyes. I saw no light, and felt no wind blowing upon me. But I heard
+whispering about me. Then I felt warm, soft hands washing my face, and
+then I felt wafts of wind coming on my face, and thought they came from
+the waving of wings. And when they had washed my eyes, the air came
+upon them so sweet and cool! and I opened them, I thought, and here I
+was lying on this couch, with butterflies and bees flitting and buzzing
+about me, the brook singing somewhere near me, and a lark up in the
+sky. But there were no angels--only plenty of light and wind and living
+creatures. And I don't think I ever knew before what happiness meant.
+Wasn't it a resurrection, papa, to come out of the grave into such a
+world as this?"
+
+"Indeed it was, my darling--and a very beautiful and true dream. There
+is no need for me to moralise it to you, for you have done so for
+yourself already. But not only do I think that the coming out of sin
+into goodness, out of unbelief into faith in God, is like your dream;
+but I do expect that no dream of such delight can come up to the sense
+of fresh life and being that we shall have when we get on the higher
+body after this one won't serve our purpose any longer, and is worn out
+and cast aside. The very ability of the mind, whether of itself, or by
+some inspiration of the Almighty, to dream such things, is a proof of
+our capacity for such things, a proof, I think, that for such things we
+were made. Here comes in the chance for faith in God--the confidence in
+his being and perfection that he would not have made us capable without
+meaning to fill that capacity. If he is able to make us capable, that
+is the harder half done already. The other he can easily do. And if he
+is love he will do it. You should thank God for that dream, Connie."
+
+"I was afraid to do that, papa."
+
+"That is as much as to fear that there is one place to which David
+might have fled, where God would not find him--the most terrible of all
+thoughts."
+
+"Where do you mean, papa?"
+
+"Dreamland, my dear. If it is right to thank God for a beautiful
+thought--I mean a thought of strength and grace giving you fresh life
+and hope--why should you be less bold to thank him when such thoughts
+arise in plainer shape--take such vivid forms to your mind that they
+seem to come through the doors of the eyes into the vestibule of the
+brain, and thence into the inner chambers of the soul?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE JOURNEY.
+
+
+For more than two months Charlie and Harry had been preparing for the
+journey. The moment they heard of the prospect of it, they began to
+prepare, accumulate, and pack stores both for the transit and the
+sojourn. First of all there was an extensive preparation of
+ginger-beer, consisting, as I was informed in confidence, of brown
+sugar, ground ginger, and cold water. This store was, however, as near
+as I can judge, exhausted and renewed about twelve times before the day
+of departure arrived; and when at last the auspicious morning dawned,
+they remembered with dismay that they had drunk the last drop two days
+before, and there was none in stock. Then there was a wonderful and
+more successful hoarding of marbles, of a variety so great that my
+memory refuses to bear the names of the different kinds, which, I
+think, must have greatly increased since the time when I too was a boy,
+when some marbles--one of real, white marble with red veins
+especially--produced in my mind something of the delight that a work of
+art produces now. These were carefully deposited in one of the many
+divisions of a huge old hair-trunk, which they had got their uncle
+Weir, who could use his father's tools with pleasure if not to profit,
+to fit up for them with a multiplicity of boxes, and cupboards, and
+drawers, and trays, and slides, that was quite bewildering. In this
+same box was stowed also a quantity of hair, the gleanings of all the
+horse-tails upon the premises. This was for making fishing-tackle, with
+a vague notion on the part of Harry that it was to be employed in
+catching whales and crocodiles. Then all their favourite books were
+stowed away in the same chest, in especial a packet of a dozen penny
+books, of which I think I could give a complete list now. For one
+afternoon as I searched about in the lumber-room after a set of old
+library steps, which I wanted to get repaired, I came upon the chest,
+and opening it, discovered my boys' hoard, and in it this packet of
+books. I sat down on the top of the chest and read them all through,
+from Jack the Giant-killer down to Hop o' my Thumb without rising, and
+this in the broad daylight, with the yellow sunshine nestling beside me
+on the rose-coloured silken seat, richly worked, of a large
+stately-looking chair with three golden legs. Yes I could tell you all
+those stories, not to say the names of them, over yet. Only I knew
+every one of them before; finding now that they had fared like good
+vintages, for if they had lost something in potency, they had gained
+much in flavour. Harry could not read these, and Charlie not very well,
+but they put confidence in them notwithstanding, in virtue of the red,
+blue, and yellow prints. Then there was a box of sawdust, the design of
+which I have not yet discovered; a huge ball of string; a rabbit's
+skin; a Noah's ark; an American clock, that refused to go for all the
+variety of treatment they gave it; a box of lead-soldiers, and twenty
+other things, amongst which was a huge gilt ball having an eagle of
+brass with outspread wings on the top of it.
+
+Great was their consternation and dismay when they found that this
+magazine could not be taken in the post-chaise in which they were to
+follow us to the station. A good part of our luggage had been sent on
+before us, but the boys had intended the precious box to go with
+themselves. Knowing well, however, how little they would miss it, and
+with what shouts of south-sea discovery they would greet the forgotten
+treasure when they returned, I insisted on the lumbering article being
+left in peace. So that, as man goeth treasureless to his grave,
+whatever he may have accumulated before the fatal moment, they had to
+set off for the far country without chest or ginger-beer--not therefore
+altogether so desolate and unprovided for as they imagined. The
+abandoned treasure was forgotten the moment the few tears it had
+occasioned were wiped away.
+
+It was the loveliest of mornings when we started upon our journey. The
+sun shone, the wind was quiet, and everything was glad. The swallows
+were twittering from the corbels they had added to the adornment of the
+dear old house.
+
+"I'm sorry to leave the swallows behind," said Wynnie, as she stepped
+into the carriage after her mother. Connie, of course, was already
+there, eager and strong-hearted for the journey.
+
+We set off. Connie was in delight with everything, especially with all
+forms of animal life and enjoyment that we saw on the road. She seemed
+to enter into the spirit of the cows feeding on the rich green grass of
+the meadows, of the donkeys eating by the roadside, of the horses we
+met bravely diligent at their day's work, as they trudged along the
+road with wagon or cart behind them. I sat by the coachman, but so that
+I could see her face by the slightest turning of my head. I knew by its
+expression that she gave a silent blessing to the little troop of a
+brown-faced gipsy family, which came out of a dingy tent to look at the
+passing carriage. A fleet of ducklings in a pool, paddling along under
+the convoy of the parent duck, next attracted her.
+
+"Look; look. Isn't that delicious?" she cried.
+
+"I don't think I should like it though," said Wynnie.
+
+"What shouldn't you like, Wynnie?" asked her mother.
+
+"To be in the water and not feel it wet. Those feathers!"
+
+"They feel it with their legs and their webby toes," said Connie.
+
+"Yes, that is some consolation," answered Wynnie.
+
+"And if you were a duck, you would feel the good of your feathers in
+winter, when you got into your cold bath of a morning."
+
+I give all this chat for the sake of showing how Connie's illness had
+not in the least withdrawn her from nature and her sympathies--had
+rather, as it were, made all the fibres of her being more delicate and
+sympathetic, so that the things around her could enter her soul even
+more easily than before, and what had seemed to shut her out had in
+reality brought her into closer contact with the movements of all
+vitality.
+
+We had to pass through the village to reach the railway station.
+Everybody almost was out to bid us good-bye. I did not want, for
+Connie's sake chiefly, to have any scene, but recalling something I had
+forgotten to say to one of my people, I stopped the carriage to speak
+to him. The same instant there was a crowd of women about us. But
+Connie was the centre of all their regards. They hardly looked at her
+mother or sister. Had she been a martyr who had stood the test and
+received her aureole, she could hardly have been more regarded. The
+common use of the word martyr is a curious instance of how words get
+degraded. The sufferings involved in martyrdom, and not the pure will
+giving occasion to that suffering, is fixed upon by the common mind as
+the martyrdom. The witness-bearing is lost sight of, except we can
+suppose that "a martyr to the toothache" means a witness of the fact of
+the toothache and its tortures. But while _martyrdom_ really means a
+bearing for the sake of the truth, yet there is a way in which any
+suffering, even that we have brought upon ourselves, may become
+martyrdom. When it is so borne that the sufferer therein bears witness
+to the presence and fatherhood of God, in quiet, hopeful submission to
+his will, in gentle endurance, and that effort after cheerfulness which
+is not seldom to be seen where the effort is hardest to make; more than
+all, perhaps, and rarest of all, when it is accepted as the just and
+merciful consequence of wrong-doing, and is endured humbly, and with
+righteous shame, as the cleansing of the Father's hand, indicating that
+repentance unto life which lifts the sinner out of his sins, and makes
+him such that the holiest men of old would talk to him with gladness
+and respect, then indeed it may be called a martyrdom. This latter
+could not be Connie's case, but the former was hers, and so far she
+might be called a martyr, even as the old women of the village
+designated her.
+
+After we had again started, our ears were invaded with shouts from the
+post-chaise behind us, in which Charlie and Harry, their grief at the
+abandoned chest forgotten as if it had never been, were yelling in the
+exuberance of their gladness. Dora, more staid as became her years, was
+trying to act the matron with them in vain, and old nursie had enough
+to do with Miss Connie's baby to heed what the young gentlemen were
+about, so long as explosions of noise was all the mischief. Walter, the
+man-servant, who had been with us ten years, and was the main prop of
+the establishment, looking after everything and putting his hand to
+everything, with an indefinite charge ranging from the nursery to the
+wine-cellar, and from the corn-bin to the pig-trough, and who, as we
+could not possibly get on without him, sat on the box of the
+post-chaise beside the driver from the Griffin, rather connived, I
+fear, than otherwise at the noise of the youngsters.
+
+"Good-bye, Marshmallows," they were shouting at the top of their
+voices, as if they had just been released from a prison, where they had
+spent a wretched childhood; and, as it could hardly offend anybody's
+ears on the open country road I allowed them to shout till they were
+tired, which condition fortunately arrived before we reached the
+station, so that there was no occasion for me to interfere. I always
+sought to give them as much liberty as could be afforded them.
+
+At the station we found Weir waiting to see us off, with my sister, now
+in wonderful health. Turner was likewise there, and ready to accompany
+us a good part of the way. But beyond the valuable assistance he lent
+us in moving Connie, no occasion arose for the exercise of his
+professional skill. She bore the journey wonderfully, slept not
+unfrequently, and only at the end showed herself at length wearied. We
+stopped three times on the way: first at Salisbury, where the streams
+running through the streets delighted her. There we remained one whole
+day, but sent the children and servants, all but my wife's maid, on
+before us, under the charge of Walter. This left us more at our ease.
+At Exeter, we stopped only the night, for Connie found herself quite
+able to go on the next morning. Here Turner left us, and we missed him
+very much. Connie looked a little out of spirits after his departure,
+but soon recovered herself. The next night we spent at a small town on
+the borders of Devonshire, which was the limit of our railway
+travelling. Here we remained for another whole day, for the remnant of
+the journey across part of Devonshire and Cornwall to the shore must be
+posted, and was a good five hours' work. We started about eleven
+o'clock, full of spirits at the thought that we had all but
+accomplished the only part of the undertaking about which we had had
+any uneasiness. Connie was quite merry. The air was thoroughly warm. We
+had an open carriage with a hood. Wynnie sat opposite her mother, Dora
+and Eliza the maid in the rumble, and I by the coachman. The road being
+very hilly, we had four horses; and with four horses, sunshine, a
+gentle wind, hope and thankfulness, who would not be happy?
+
+There is a strange delight in motion, which I am not sure that I
+altogether understand. The hope of the end as bringing fresh enjoyment
+has something to do with it, no doubt; the accompaniments of the
+motion, the change of scene, the mystery that lies beyond the next hill
+or the next turn in the road, the breath of the summer wind, the scent
+of the pine-trees especially, and of all the earth, the tinkling jangle
+of the harness as you pass the trees on the roadside, the life of the
+horses, the glitter and the shadow, the cottages and the roses and the
+rosy faces, the scent of burning wood or peat from the chimneys, these
+and a thousand other things combine to make such a journey delightful.
+But I believe it needs something more than this--something even closer
+to the human life--to account for the pleasure that motion gives us. I
+suspect it is its living symbolism; the hidden relations which it bears
+to the eternal soul in its aspirations and longings--ever following
+after, ever attaining, never satisfied. Do not misunderstand me, my
+reader. A man, you will allow, perhaps, may be content although he is
+not and cannot be happy: I feel inclined to turn all this the other
+way, saying that a man ought always to be happy, never to be content.
+You will see I do not say _contented_; I say _content_. Here comes in
+his faith: his life is hid with Christ in God, measureless, unbounded.
+All things are his, to become his by blessed lovely gradations of gift,
+as his being enlarges to receive; and if ever the shadow of his own
+necessary incompleteness falls upon the man, he has only to remember
+that in God's idea he is complete, only his life is hid from himself
+with Christ in God the Infinite. If anyone accuses me here of
+mysticism, I plead guilty with gladness: I only hope it may be of that
+true mysticism which, inasmuch as he makes constant use of it, St. Paul
+would understand at once. I leave it, however.
+
+I think I must have been the very happiest of the party myself. No
+doubt I was younger much than I am now, but then I was quite
+middle-aged, with full confession thereof in gray hairs and wrinkles.
+Why should not a man be happy when he is growing old, so long as his
+faith strengthens the feeble knees which chiefly suffer in the process
+of going down the hill? True, the fever heat is over, and the oil burns
+more slowly in the lamp of life; but if there is less fervour, there is
+more pervading warmth; if less of fire, more of sunshine; there is less
+smoke and more light. Verily, youth is good, but old age is better--to
+the man who forsakes not his youth when his youth forsakes him. The
+sweet visitings of nature do not depend upon youth or romance, but upon
+that quiet spirit whose meekness inherits the earth. The smell of that
+field of beans gives me more delight now than ever it could have given
+me when I was a youth. And if I ask myself why I find it is simply
+because I have more faith now than I had then. It came to me then as an
+accident of nature--a passing pleasure flung to me only as the dogs'
+share of the crumbs. Now I believe that God _means_ that odour of the
+bean-field; that when Jesus smelled such a scent about Jerusalem or in
+Galilee, he thought of his Father. And if God means it, it is mine,
+even if I should never smell it again. The music of the spheres is mine
+if old age should make me deaf as the adder. Am I mystical again,
+reader? Then I hope you are too, or will be before you have done with
+this same beautiful mystical life of ours. More and more nature becomes
+to me one of God's books of poetry--not his grandest--that is
+history--but his loveliest, perhaps.
+
+And ought I not to have been happy when all who were with me were
+happy? I will not run the risk of wearying even my contemplative reader
+by describing to him the various reflexes of happiness that shone from
+the countenances behind me in the carriage, but I will try to hit each
+off in a word, or a single simile. My Ethelwyn's face was bright with
+the brightness of a pale silvery moon that has done her harvest work,
+and, a little weary, lifts herself again into the deeper heavens from
+stooping towards the earth. Wynnie's face was bright with the
+brightness of the morning star, ever growing pale and faint over the
+amber ocean that brightens at the sun's approach; for life looked to
+Wynnie severe in its light, and somewhat sad because severe. Connie's
+face was bright with the brightness of a lake in the rosy evening, the
+sound of the river flowing in and the sound of the river flowing forth
+just audible, but itself still, and content to be still and mirror the
+sunset. Dora's was bright with the brightness of a marigold that
+follows the sun without knowing it; and Eliza's was bright with the
+brightness of a half-blown cabbage rose, radiating good-humour. This
+last is not a good simile, but I cannot find a better. I confess
+failure, and go on.
+
+After stopping once to bait, during which operation Connie begged to be
+carried into the parlour of the little inn that she might see the china
+figures that were certain to be on the chimney-piece, as indeed they
+were, where she drank a whole tumbler of new milk before we lifted her
+to carry her back, we came upon a wide high moorland country the roads
+through which were lined with gorse in full golden bloom, while patches
+of heather all about were showing their bells, though not yet in their
+autumnal outburst of purple fire. Here I began to be reminded of
+Scotland, in which I had travelled a good deal between the ages of
+twenty and five-and-twenty. The further I went the stronger I felt the
+resemblance. The look of the fields, the stone fences that divided
+them, the shape and colour and materials of the houses, the aspect of
+the people, the feeling of the air, and of the earth and sky generally,
+made me imagine myself in a milder and more favoured Scotland. The west
+wind was fresh, but had none of that sharp edge which one can so often
+detect in otherwise warm winds blowing under a hot sun. Though she had
+already travelled so many miles, Connie brightened up within a few
+minutes after we got on this moor; and we had not gone much farther
+before a shout from the rumble informed us that keen-eyed little Dora
+had discovered the Atlantic: a dip in the high coast revealed it blue
+and bright. We soon lost sight of it again, but in Connie's eyes it
+seemed to linger still. As often as I looked round, the blue of them
+seemed the reflection of the sea in their little convex mirrors.
+Ethelwyn's eyes, too, were full of it, and a flush on her generally
+pale cheek showed that she too expected the ocean. After a few miles
+along this breezy expanse, we began to descend towards the sea-level.
+Down the winding of a gradual slope, interrupted by steep descents, we
+approached this new chapter in our history. We came again upon a few
+trees here and there, all with their tops cut off in a plane inclined
+upwards away from the sea. For the sea-winds, like a sweeping scythe,
+bend the trees all away towards the land, and keep their tops mown with
+their sharp rushing, keen with salt spray off the crests of the broken
+waves. Then we passed through some ancient villages, with streets
+narrow, and steep and sharp-angled, that needed careful driving and the
+frequent pressure of the break upon the wheel. And now the sea shone
+upon us with nearer greeting, and we began to fancy we could hear its
+talk with the shore. At length we descended a sharp hill, reached the
+last level, drove over a bridge and down the line of the stream, saw
+the land vanish in the sea--a wide bay; then drove over another wooden
+drawbridge, and along the side of a canal in which lay half-a-dozen
+sloops and schooners. Then came a row of pretty cottages; then a gate,
+and an ascent, and ere we reached the rectory, we were aware of its
+proximity by loud shouts, and the sight of Charlie and Harry scampering
+along the top of a stone wall to meet us. This made their mother
+nervous, but she kept quiet, knowing that unrestrained anxiety is
+always in danger of bringing about the evil it fears. A moment after,
+we drew up at a long porch, leading through the segment of a circle to
+the door of the house. The journey was over. We got down in the little
+village of Kilkhaven, in the county of Cornwall.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+WHAT WE DID WHEN WE ARRIVED.
+
+
+We carried Connie in first of all, of course, and into the room which
+nurse had fixed upon for her--the best in the house, of course, again.
+She did seem tired now, and no wonder. She had a cup of tea at once,
+and in half an hour dinner was ready, of which we were all very glad.
+After dinner I went up to Connie's room. There I found her fast asleep
+on the sofa, and Wynnie as fast asleep on the floor beside her. The
+drive and the sea air had had the same effect on both of them. But
+pleased as I was to see Connie sleeping so sweetly, I was even more
+pleased to see Wynnie asleep on the floor. What a wonderful
+satisfaction it may give to a father and mother to see this or that
+child asleep! It is when her kittens are asleep that the cat creeps
+away to look after her own comforts. Our cat chose to have her kittens
+in my study once, and as I would not have her further disturbed than to
+give them another cushion to lie on in place of that which belonged to
+my sofa, I had many opportunities of watching them as I wrote, or
+prepared my sermons. But I must not talk about the cat and her kittens
+now. When parents see their children asleep, especially if they have
+been suffering in any way, they breathe more freely; a load is lifted
+off their minds; their responsibility seems over; the children have
+gone back to their Father, and he alone is looking after them for a
+while. Now, I had not been comfortable about Wynnie for some time, and
+especially during our journey, and still more especially during the
+last part of our journey. There was something amiss with her. She
+seemed constantly more or less dejected, as if she had something to
+think about that was too much for her, although, to tell the truth, I
+really believe now that she had not quite enough to think about. Some
+people can thrive tolerably without much thought: at least, they both
+live comfortably without it, and do not seem to be capable of effecting
+it if it were required of them; while for others a large amount of
+mental and spiritual operation is necessary for the health of both body
+and mind, and when the matter or occasion for so much is not afforded
+them, the consequence is analogous to what follows when a healthy
+physical system is not supplied with sufficient food: the oxygen, the
+source of life, begins to consume the life itself; it tears up the
+timbers of the house to burn against the cold. Or, to use a different
+simile, when the Moses-rod of circumstance does not strike the rock and
+make the waters flow, such a mind--one that must think to live--will go
+digging into itself, and is in danger of injuring the very fountain of
+thought, by drawing away its living water into ditches and stagnant
+pools. This was, I say, the case in part with my Wynnie, although I did
+not understand it at that moment. She did not look quite happy, did not
+always meet a smile with a smile, looked almost reprovingly upon the
+frolics of the little brother-imps, and though kindness itself when any
+real hurt or grief befell them, had reverted to her old, somewhat
+dictatorial manner, of which I have already spoken as interrupted by
+Connie's accident. To her mother and me she was service itself, only
+service without the smile which is as the flame of the sacrifice and
+makes it holy. So we were both a little uneasy about her, for we did
+not understand her. On the journey she had seemed almost annoyed at
+Connie's ecstasies, and said to Dora many times: "Do be quiet, Dora;"
+although there was not a single creature but ourselves within hearing,
+and poor Connie seemed only delighted with the child's explosions. So I
+was--but although I say _so_, I hardly know why I was pleased to see
+her thus, except it was from a vague belief in the anodyne of slumber.
+But this pleasure did not last long; for as I stood regarding my two
+treasures, even as if my eyes had made her uncomfortable, she suddenly
+opened hers, and started to her feet, with the words, "I beg your
+pardon, papa," looking almost guiltily round her, and putting up her
+hair hurriedly, as if she had committed an impropriety in being caught
+untidy. This was fresh sign of a condition of mind that was not healthy.
+
+"My dear," I said, "what do you beg my pardon for? I was so pleased to
+see you asleep! and you look as if you thought I were going to scold
+you."
+
+"O papa," she said, laying her head on my shoulder, "I am afraid I must
+be very naughty. I so often feel now as if I were doing something
+wrong, or rather as if you would think I was doing something wrong. I
+am sure there must be something wicked in me somewhere, though I do not
+clearly know what it is. When I woke up now, I felt as if I had
+neglected something, and you had come to find fault with me. _Is_ there
+anything, papa?"
+
+"Nothing whatever, my child. But you cannot be well when you feel like
+that."
+
+"I am perfectly well, so far as I know. I was so cross to Dora to-day!
+Why shouldn't I feel happy when everybody else is? I must be wicked,
+papa."
+
+Here Connie woke up.
+
+"There now! I've waked Connie," Wynnie resumed. "I'm always doing
+something I ought not to do. Please go to sleep again, Connie, and take
+that sin off my poor conscience."
+
+"What nonsense is Wynnie talking about being wicked?" asked Connie.
+
+"It isn't nonsense, Connie. You know I am."
+
+"I know nothing of the sort, Wynnie. If it were me now! And yet I don't
+_feel_ wicked."
+
+"My dear children," I said, "we must all pray to God for his Spirit,
+and then we shall feel just as we ought to feel. It is not for anyone
+to say to himself how he ought to feel at any given moment; still less
+for one man to say to another how he ought to feel; that is in the
+former case to do as St. Paul says he had learned to give up doing--to
+judge our own selves, which ought to be left to God; in the latter case
+it is to do what our Lord has told us expressly we are not to do--to
+judge other people. You get your bonnet, Wynnie, and come out with me.
+I am going to explore a little of this desert island upon which we have
+been cast away. And you, Connie, just to please Wynnie, must try and go
+to sleep again."
+
+Wynnie ran for her bonnet, a little afraid perhaps that I was going to
+talk seriously to her, but showing no reluctance anyhow to accompany me.
+
+Now I wonder whether it will be better to tell what we saw, or only
+what we talked about, and give what we saw in the shape in which we
+reported it to Connie, when we came back into her room, bearing, like
+the spies who went to search the land, our bunch of grapes, that is, of
+sweet news of nature, to her who could not go to gather them for
+herself. It think it will be the best plan to take part of both plans.
+
+When we left the door of the house, we went up the few steps of a stair
+leading on to the downs, against and amidst, and indeed _in_, the
+rocks, buttressing the sea-edge of which our new abode was built. A
+life for a big-winged angel seemed waiting us upon those downs. The
+wind still blew from the west, both warm and strong--I mean
+strength-giving--and the wind was the first thing we were aware of. The
+ground underfoot was green and soft and springy, and sprinkled all over
+with the bright flowers, chiefly yellow, that live amidst the short
+grasses of the downs, the shadows of whose unequal surface were now
+beginning to be thrown east, for the sun was going seawards. I stood
+up, stretched out my arms, threw back my shoulders and my head, and
+filled my chest with a draught of the delicious wind, feeling
+thereafter like a giant refreshed with wine. Wynnie stood apparently
+unmoved amidst the life-nectar, thoughtful, and turning her eyes hither
+and thither.
+
+"That makes me feel young again," I said.
+
+"I wish it would make me feel old then," said Wynnie.
+
+"What do you mean, my child?"
+
+"Because then I should have a chance of knowing what it is like to feel
+young," she answered rather enigmatically. I did not reply. We were
+walking up the brow which hid the sea from us. The smell of the
+down-turf was indescribable in its homely delicacy; and by the time we
+had reached the top, almost every sense was filled with its own
+delight. The top of the hill was the edge of the great shore-cliff; and
+the sun was hanging on the face of the mightier sky-cliff opposite, and
+the sea stretched for visible miles and miles along the shore on either
+hand, its wide blue mantle fringed with lovely white wherever it met
+the land, and scalloped into all fantastic curves, according to the
+whim of the nether fires which had formed its bed; and the rush of the
+waves, as they bore the rising tide up on the shore, was the one music
+fit for the whole. Ear and eye, touch and smell, were alike invaded
+with blessedness. I ought to have kept this to give my reader in
+Connie's room; but he shall share with her presently. The sense of
+space--of mighty room for life and growth--filled my soul, and I
+thanked God in my heart. The wind seemed to bear that growth into my
+soul, even as the wind of God first breathed into man's nostrils the
+breath of life, and the sun was the pledge of the fulfilment of every
+aspiration. I turned and looked at Wynnie. She stood pleased but
+listless amidst that which lifted me into the heaven of the Presence.
+
+"Don't you enjoy all this grandeur, Wynnie?"
+
+"I told you I was very wicked, papa."
+
+"And I told you not to say so, Wynnie."
+
+"You see I cannot enjoy it, papa. I wonder why it is."
+
+"I suspect it is because you haven't room, Wynnie."
+
+"I know you mean something more than I know, papa."
+
+"I mean, my dear, that it is not because you are wicked, but because
+you do not know God well enough, and therefore your being, which can
+only live in him, is 'cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in.' It is only
+in him that the soul has room. In knowing him is life and its gladness.
+The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know Him
+who knows its secret. Look up, my darling; see the heavens and the
+earth. You do not feel them, and I do not call upon you to feel them.
+It would be both useless and absurd to do so. But just let them look at
+you for a moment, and then tell me whether it must not be a blessed
+life that creates such a glory as this All."
+
+She stood silent for a moment, looked up at the sky, looked round on
+the earth, looked far across the sea to the setting sun, and then
+turned her eyes upon me. They were filled with tears, but whether from
+feeling, or sorrow that she could not feel, I would not inquire. I made
+haste to speak again.
+
+"As this world of delight surrounds and enters your bodily frame, so
+does God surround your soul and live in it. To be at home with the
+awful source of your being, through the child-like faith which he not
+only permits, but requires, and is ever teaching you, or rather seeking
+to rouse up in you, is the only cure for such feelings as those that
+trouble you. Do not say it is too high for you. God made you in his own
+image, therefore capable of understanding him. For this final end he
+sent his Son, that the Father might with him come into you, and dwell
+with you. Till he does so, the temple of your soul is vacant; there is
+no light behind the veil, no cloudy pillar over it; and the priests,
+your thoughts, feelings, loves, and desires, moan, and are
+troubled--for where is the work of the priest when the God is not
+there? When He comes to you, no mystery, no unknown feeling, will any
+longer distress you. You will say, 'He knows, though I do not.' And you
+will be at the secret of the things he has made. You will feel what
+they are, and that which his will created in gladness you will receive
+in joy. One glimmer of the present God in this glory would send you
+home singing. But do not think I blame you, Wynnie, for feeling sad. I
+take it rather as the sign of a large life in you, that will not be
+satisfied with little things. I do not know when or how it may please
+God to give you the quiet of mind that you need; but I tell you that I
+believe it is to be had; and in the mean time, you must go on doing
+your work, trusting in God even for this. Tell him to look at your
+sorrow, ask him to come and set it right, making the joy go up in your
+heart by his presence. I do not know when this may be, I say, but you
+must have patience, and till he lays his hand on your head, you must be
+content to wash his feet with your tears. Only he will be better
+pleased if your faith keep you from weeping and from going about your
+duties mournful. Try to be brave and cheerful for the sake of Christ,
+and for the sake of your confidence in the beautiful teaching of God,
+whose course and scope you cannot yet understand. Trust, my daughter,
+and let that give you courage and strength."
+
+Now the sky and the sea and the earth must have made me able to say
+these things to her; but I knew that, whatever the immediate occasion
+of her sadness, such was its only real cure. Other things might, in
+virtue of the will of God that was in them, give her occupation and
+interest enough for a time, but nothing would do finally, but God
+himself. Here I was sure I was safe; here I knew lay the hunger of
+humanity. Humanity may, like other vital forms, diseased systems, fix
+on this or that as the object not merely of its desire but of its need:
+it can never be stilled by less than the bread of life--the very
+presence in the innermost nature of the Father and the Son.
+
+We walked on together. Wynnie made me no reply, but, weeping silently,
+clung to my arm. We walked a long way by the edge of the cliffs, beheld
+the sun go down, and then turned and went home. When we reached the
+house, Wynnie left me, saying only, "Thank you, papa. I think it is all
+true. I will try to be a better girl."
+
+I went straight to Connie's room: she was lying as I saw her last,
+looking out of her window.
+
+"Connie," I said, "Wynnie and I have had such a treat--such a sunset!"
+
+"I've seen a little of the light of it on the waves in the bay there,
+but the high ground kept me from seeing the sunset itself. Did it set
+in the sea?"
+
+"You do want the General Gazetteer, after all, Connie. Is that water
+the Atlantic, or is it not? And if it be, where on earth could the sun
+set but in it?"
+
+"Of course, papa. What a goose I am! But don't make game of
+me--_please_. I am too deliciously happy to be made game of to-night."
+
+"I won't make game of you, my darling. I will tell you about the
+sunset--the colours of it, at least. This must be one of the best
+places in the whole world to see sunsets."
+
+"But you have had no tea, papa. I thought you would come and have your
+tea with me. But you were so long, that mamma would not let me wait any
+longer."
+
+"O, never mind the tea, my dear. But Wynnie has had none. You've got a
+tea-caddy of your own, haven't you?"
+
+"Yes, and a teapot; and there's the kettle on the hob--for I can't do
+without a little fire in the evenings."
+
+"Then I'll make some tea for Wynnie and myself, and tell you at the
+same time about the sunset. I never saw such colours. I cannot tell you
+what it was like while the sun was yet going down, for the glory of it
+has burned the memory of it out of me. But after the sun was down, the
+sky remained thinking about him; and the thought of the sky was in
+delicate translucent green on the horizon, just the colour of the earth
+etherealised and glorified--a broad band; then came another broad band
+of pale rose-colour; and above that came the sky's own eternal blue,
+pale likewise, but so sure and changeless. I never saw the green and
+the blue divided and harmonised by the rose-colour before. It was a
+wonderful sight. If it is warm enough to-morrow, we will carry you out
+on the height, that you may see what the evening will bring."
+
+"There is one thing about sunsets," returned Connie--"two things, that
+make me rather sad--about themselves, not about anything else. Shall I
+tell you them?"
+
+"Do, my love. There are few things more precious to learn than the
+effects of Nature upon individual minds. And there is not a feeling of
+yours, my child, that is not of value to me."
+
+"You are so kind, papa! I am so glad of my accident. I think I should
+never have known how good you are but for that. But my thoughts seem so
+little worth after you say so much about them."
+
+"Let me be judge of that, my dear."
+
+"Well, one thing is, that we shall never, never, never, see the same
+sunset again."
+
+"That is true. But why should we? God does not care to do the same
+thing over again. When it is once done, it is done, and he goes on
+doing something new. For, to all eternity, he never will have done
+showing himself by new, fresh things. It would be a loss to do the same
+thing again."
+
+"But that just brings me to my second trouble. The thing is lost. I
+forget it. Do what I can, I cannot remember sunsets. I try to fix them
+fast in my memory, that I may recall them when I want them; but just as
+they fade out of the sky, all into blue or gray, so they fade out of my
+mind and leave it as if they had never been there--except perhaps two
+or three. Now, though I did not see this one, yet, after you have
+talked about it, I shall never forget _it_."
+
+"It is not, and never will be, as if they had never been. They have
+their influence, and leave that far deeper than your memory--in your
+very being, Connie. But I have more to say about it, although it is
+only an idea, hardly an assurance. Our brain is necessarily an
+imperfect instrument. For its right work, perhaps it is needful that it
+should forget in part. But there are grounds for believing that nothing
+is ever really forgotten. I think that, when we have a higher existence
+than we have now, when we are clothed with that spiritual body of which
+St. Paul speaks, you will be able to recall any sunset you have ever
+seen with an intensity proportioned to the degree of regard and
+attention you gave it when it was present to you. But here comes Wynnie
+to see how you are.--I've been making some tea for you, Wynnie, my
+love."
+
+"O, thank you, papa--I shall be so glad of some tea!" said Wynnie, the
+paleness of whose face showed the red rims of her eyes the more
+plainly. She had had what girls call a good cry, and was clearly the
+better for it.
+
+The same moment my wife came in. "Why didn't you send for me, Harry, to
+get your tea?" she said.
+
+"I did not deserve any, seeing I had disregarded proper times and
+seasons. But I knew you must be busy."
+
+"I have been superintending the arrangement of bedrooms, and the
+unpacking, and twenty different things," said Ethelwyn. "We shall be so
+comfortable! It is such a curious house! Have you had a nice walk?"
+
+"Mamma, I never had such a walk in my life," returned Wynnie. "You
+would think the shore had been built for the sake of the show--just for
+a platform to see sunsets from. And the sea! Only the cliffs will be
+rather dangerous for the children."
+
+"I have just been telling Connie about the sunset. She could see
+something of the colours on the water, but not much more."
+
+"O, Connie, it will be so delightful to get you out here! Everything is
+so big! There is such room everywhere! But it must be awfully windy in
+winter," said Wynnie, whose nature was always a little prospective, if
+not apprehensive.
+
+But I must not keep my reader longer upon mere family chat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+MORE ABOUT KILKHAVEN.
+
+
+Our dining-room was one story below the level at which we had entered
+the parsonage; for, as I have said, the house was built into the face
+of the cliff, just where it sunk nearly to the level of the shores of
+the bay. While at dinner, on the evening of our arrival, I kept looking
+from the window, of course, and I saw before me, first a little bit of
+garden, mostly in turf, then a low stone wall; beyond, over the top of
+the wall, the blue water of the bay; then beyond the water, all alive
+with light and motion, the rocks and sand-hills of the opposite side of
+the little bay, not a quarter of a mile across. I could likewise see
+where the shore went sweeping out and away to the north, with rock
+after rock standing far into the water, as if gazing over the awful
+wild, where there was nothing to break the deathly waste between
+Cornwall and Newfoundland. But for the moment I did not regard the huge
+power lying outside so much as the merry blue bay between me and those
+rocks and sand-hills. If I moved my head a little to the right, I saw,
+over the top of the low wall already mentioned, and apparently quite
+close to it the slender yellow masts of a schooner, her mainsail
+hanging loose from the gaff, whose peak was lowered. We must, I
+thought, be on the very harbour-quay. When I went out for my walk with
+Wynnie, I had turned from the bay, and gone to the brow of the cliffs
+overhanging the open sea on our own side of it.
+
+When I came down to breakfast in the same room next morning, I stared.
+The blue had changed to yellow. The life of the water was gone. Nothing
+met my eyes but a wide expanse of dead sand. You could walk straight
+across the bay to the hills opposite. From the look of the rocks, from
+the perpendicular cliffs on the coast, I had almost, without thinking,
+concluded that we were on the shore of a deep-water bay. It was
+high-water, or nearly so, then; and now, when I looked westward, it was
+over a long reach of sands, on the far border of which the white fringe
+of the waves was visible, as if there was their _hitherto_, and further
+towards us they could not come. Beyond the fringe lay the low hill of
+the Atlantic. To add to my confusion, when I looked to the right, that
+is, up the bay towards the land, there was no schooner there. I went
+out at the window, which opened from the room upon the little lawn, to
+look, and then saw in a moment how it was.
+
+"Do you know, my dear," I said to my wife, "we are just at the mouth of
+that canal we saw as we came along? There are gates and a lock just
+outside there. The schooner that was under this window last night must
+have gone in with the tide. She is lying in the basin above now."
+
+"O, yes, papa," Charlie and Harry broke in together. "We saw it go up
+this morning. We've been out ever so long. It was so funny," Charlie
+went on--everything was _funny_ with Charlie--"to see it rise up like a
+Jack-in-the-box, and then slip into the quiet water through the other
+gates!"
+
+And when I thought about the waves tumbling and breaking away out
+there, and the wide yellow sands between, it was wonderful--which was
+what Charlie meant by funny--to see the little vessel lying so many
+feet above it all, in a still plenty of repose, gathering strength, one
+might fancy to rush out again, when its time was come, into the turmoil
+beyond, and dash its way through the breasts of the billows.
+
+After breakfast we had prayers, as usual, and after a visit to Connie,
+whom I found tired, but wonderfully well, I went out for a walk by
+myself, to explore the neighbourhood, find the church, and, in a word,
+do something to shake myself into my new garments. The day was
+glorious. I wandered along a green path, in the opposite direction from
+our walk the evening before, with a fir-wood on my right hand, and a
+belt of feathery tamarisks on my left, behind which lay gardens sloping
+steeply to a lower road, where stood a few pretty cottages. Turning a
+corner, I came suddenly in sight of the church, on the green down above
+me--a sheltered yet commanding situation; for, while the hill rose
+above it, protecting it from the east, it looked down the bay, and the
+Atlantic lay open before it. All the earth seemed to lie behind it, and
+all its gaze to be fixed on the symbol of the infinite. It stood as the
+church ought to stand, leading men up the mount of vision, to the verge
+of the eternal, to send them back with their hearts full of the
+strength that springs from hope, by which alone the true work of the
+world can be done. And when I saw it I rejoiced to think that once more
+I was favoured with a church that had a history. Of course it is a
+happy thing to see new churches built wherever there is need of such;
+but to the full idea of the building it is necessary that it should be
+one in which the hopes and fears, the cares and consolations, the loves
+and desires of our forefathers should have been roofed; where the
+hearts of those through whom our country has become that which it
+is--from whom not merely the life-blood of our bodies, but the
+life-blood of our spirits, has come down to us, whose existence and
+whose efforts have made it possible for us to be that which we
+are--have before us worshipped that Spirit from whose fountain the
+whole torrent of being flows, who ever pours fresh streams into the
+wearying waters of humanity, so ready to settle down into a stagnant
+repose. Therefore I would far rather, when I may, worship in an old
+church, whose very stones are a history of how men strove to realise
+the infinite, compelling even the powers of nature into the task--as I
+soon found on the very doorway of this church, where the ripples of the
+outspread ocean, and grotesque imaginations of the monsters of its
+deeps, fixed, as it might seem, for ever in stone, gave a distorted
+reflex, from the little mirror of the artist's mind, of that mighty
+water, so awful, so significant to the human eye, which yet lies in the
+hollow of the Father's palm, like the handful that the weary traveller
+lifts from the brook by the way. It is in virtue of the truth that went
+forth in such and such like attempts that we are able to hold our
+portion of the infinite reality which God only knows. They have founded
+our Church for us, and such a church as this will stand for the symbol
+of it; for here we too can worship the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of
+Jacob--the God of Sidney, of Hooker, of Herbert. This church of
+Kilkhaven, old and worn, rose before me a history in stone--so beaten
+and swept about by the "wild west wind,"
+
+  "For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
+  Cleave themselves into chasms,"
+
+and so streamed upon, and washed, and dissolved, by the waters lifted
+from the sea and borne against it on the upper tide of the wind, that
+you could almost fancy it one of those churches that have been buried
+for ages beneath the encroaching waters, lifted again, by some mighty
+revulsion of nature's heart, into the air of the sweet heavens, there
+to stand marked for ever with the tide-flows of the nether
+world--scooped, and hollowed, and worn like aeonian rocks that have
+slowly, but for ever, responded to the swirl and eddy of the wearing
+waters. So, from the most troublous of times, will the Church of our
+land arise, in virtue of what truth she holds, and in spite, if she
+rises at all, of the worldliness of those who, instead of seeking her
+service, have sought and gained the dignities which, if it be good that
+she have it in her power to bestow them, need the corrective of a
+sharply wholesome persecution which of late times she has not known.
+But God knows, and the fire will come in its course--first in the form
+of just indignation, it may be, against her professed servants, and
+then in the form of the furnace seven times heated, in which the true
+builders shall yet walk unhurt save as to their mortal part.
+
+I looked about for some cottage where the sexton might be supposed to
+live, and spied a slated roof, nearly on a level with the road, at a
+little distance in front of me. I could at least inquire there. Before
+I reached it, however, an elderly woman came out and approached me. She
+was dressed in a white cap and a dark-coloured gown. On her face lay a
+certain repose which attracted me. She looked as if she had suffered
+but had consented to it, and therefore could smile. Her smile lay near
+the surface. A kind word was enough to draw it up from the well where
+it lay shimmering: you could always see the smile there, whether it was
+born or not. But even when she smiled, in the very glimmering of that
+moonbeam, you could see the deep, still, perhaps dark, waters under. O!
+if one could but understand what goes on in the souls that have no
+words, perhaps no inclination, to set it forth! What had she endured?
+How had she learned to have that smile always near? What had consoled
+her, and yet left her her grief--turned it, perhaps, into hope? Should
+I ever know?
+
+She drew near me, as if she would have passed me, as she would have
+done, had I not spoken. I think she came towards me to give me the
+opportunity of speaking if I wished, but she would not address me.
+
+"Good morning," I said. "Can you tell me where to find the sexton?"
+
+"Well, sir," she answered, with a gleam of the smile brightening
+underneath her old skin, as it were, "I be all the sexton you be likely
+to find this mornin', sir. My husband, he be gone out to see one o'
+Squire Tregarva's hounds as was took ill last night. So if you want to
+see the old church, sir, you'll have to be content with an old woman to
+show you, sir."
+
+"I shall be quite content, I assure you," I answered. "Will you go and
+get the key?"
+
+"I have the key in my pocket, sir; for I thought that would be what
+you'd be after, sir. And by the time you come to my age, sir, you'll
+learn to think of your old bones, sir. I beg your pardon for making so
+free. For mayhap, says I to myself, he be the gentleman as be come to
+take Mr. Shepherd's duty for him. Be ye now, sir?"
+
+All this was said in a slow sweet subdued tone, nearly of one pitch.
+You would have felt that she claimed the privilege of age with a kind
+of mournful gaiety, but was careful, and anxious even, not to presume
+upon it, and, therefore, gentle as a young girl.
+
+"Yes," I answered. "My name is Walton I have come to take the place of
+my friend Mr. Shepherd; and, of course, I want to see the church."
+
+"Well, she be a bee-utiful old church. Some things, I think, sir, grows
+more beautiful the older they grows. But it ain't us, sir."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that," I said. "What do you mean?"
+
+"Well, sir, there's my little grandson in the cottage there: he'll
+never be so beautiful again. Them children du be the loves. But we all
+grows uglier as we grows older. Churches don't seem to, sir."
+
+"I'm not so sure about all that," I said again.
+
+"They did say, sir, that I was a pretty girl once. I'm not much to look
+at now."
+
+And she smiled with such a gracious amusement, that I felt at once that
+if there was any vanity left in this memory of her past loveliness, it
+was sweet as the memory of their old fragrance left in the withered
+leaves of the roses.
+
+"But it du not matter, du it, sir? Beauty is only skin-deep."
+
+"I don't believe that," I answered. "Beauty is as deep as the heart at
+least."
+
+"Well to be sure, my old husband du say I be as handsome in his eyes as
+ever I be. But I beg your pardon, sir, for talkin' about myself. I
+believe it was the old church--she set us on to it."
+
+"The old church didn't lead you into any harm then," I answered. "The
+beauty that is in the heart will shine out of the face again some
+day--be sure of that. And after all, there is just the same kind of
+beauty in a good old face that there is in an old church. You can't say
+the church is so trim and neat as it was the day that the first blast
+of the organ filled it as with, a living soul. The carving is not quite
+so sharp, the timbers are not quite so clean. There is a good deal of
+mould and worm-eating and cobwebs about the old place. Yet both you and
+I think it more beautiful now than it was then. Well, I believe it is,
+as nearly as possible, the same with an old face. It has got stained,
+and weather-beaten, and worn; but if the organ of truth has been
+playing on inside the temple of the Lord, which St. Paul says our
+bodies are, there is in the old face, though both form and complexion
+are gone, just the beauty of the music inside. The wrinkles and the
+brownness can't spoil it. A light shines through it all--that of the
+indwelling spirit. I wish we all grew old like the old churches."
+
+She did not reply, but I thought I saw in her face that she understood
+my mysticism. We had been walking very slowly, had passed through the
+quaint lych-gate, and now the old woman had got the key in the lock of
+the door, whose archway was figured and fashioned as I have described
+above, with a dozen mouldings or more, most of them "carved so
+curiously."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE OLD CHURCH.
+
+
+The awe that dwells in churches fell upon me as I crossed the
+threshold--an awe I never fail to feel--heightened in many cases, no
+doubt, by the sense of antiquity and of art, but an awe which I have
+felt all the same in crossing the threshold of an old Puritan
+conventicle, as the place where men worship and have worshipped the God
+of their fathers, although for art there was only the science of common
+bricklaying, and for beauty staring ugliness. To the involuntary fancy,
+the air of petition and of holy need seems to linger in the place, and
+the uncovered head acknowledges the sacred symbols of human inspiration
+and divine revealing. But this was no ordinary church into which I
+followed the gentlewoman who was my guide. As entering I turned my eyes
+eastward, a flush of subdued glory invaded them from the chancel, all
+the windows of which were of richly stained glass, and the roof of
+carved oak lavishly gilded. I had my thoughts about this chancel, and
+thence about chancels generally which may appear in another part of my
+story. Now I have to do only with the church, not with the cogitations
+to which it gave rise. But I will not trouble my reader with even what
+I could tell him of the blending and contradicting of styles and modes
+of architectural thought in the edifice. Age is to the work of
+contesting human hands a wonderful harmoniser of differences. As nature
+brings into harmony all fractures of her frame, and even positive
+intrusions upon her realm, clothes and discolours them, in the old
+sense of the word, so that at length there is no immediate shock at
+sight of that which in itself was crude, and is yet coarse, so the
+various architecture of this building had been gone over after the
+builders by the musical hand of Eld, with wonder of delicate transition
+and change of key, that one could almost fancy the music of its
+exquisite organ had been at work _informing_ the building, half melting
+the sutures, wearing the sharpness, and blending the angles, until in
+some parts there was but the gentle flickering of the original
+conception left, all its self-assertion vanished under the file of the
+air and the gnawing of the worm. True, the hand of the restorer had
+been busy, but it had wrought lovingly and gently, and wherein it had
+erred, the same influences of nature, though as yet their effects were
+invisible, were already at work--of the many making one. I will not
+trouble my reader, I say, with any architectural description, which,
+possibly even more than a detailed description of natural beauty
+dissociated from human feeling, would only weary him, even if it were
+not unintelligible. When we are reading a poem, we do not first of all
+examine the construction and dwell on the rhymes and rhythms; all that
+comes after, if we find that the poem itself is so good that its parts
+are therefore worth examining, as being probably good in themselves,
+and elucidatory of the main work. There were carvings on the ends of
+the benches all along the aisle on both sides, well worth examination,
+and some of them even of description; but I shall not linger on these.
+A word only about the columns: they supported arches of different
+fashion on the opposite sides, but they were themselves similar in
+matter and construction, both remarkable. They were of coarse granite
+of the country, chiselled, but very far from smooth, not to say
+polished. Each pillar was a single stone with chamfered sides.
+
+Walking softly through the ancient house, forgetting in the many
+thoughts that arose within me that I had a companion, I came at length
+into the tower, the basement of which was open, forming part of the
+body of the church. There hung many ropes through holes in a ceiling
+above, for bell-ringing was encouraged and indeed practised by my
+friend Shepherd. And as I regarded them, I thought within myself how
+delightful it would be if in these days as in those of Samuel, the word
+of God was precious; so that when it came to the minister of his
+people--a fresh vision of his glory, a discovery of his meaning--he
+might make haste to the church, and into the tower, lay hold of the
+rope that hung from the deepest-toned bell of all, and constrain it by
+the force of strong arms to utter its voice of call, "Come hither, come
+hear, my people, for God hath spoken;" and from the streets or the
+lanes would troop the eager folk; the plough be left in the furrow, the
+cream in the churn; and the crowding people bring faces into the
+church, all with one question upon them--"What hath the Lord spoken?"
+But now it would be answer sufficient to such a call to say, "But what
+will become of the butter?" or, "An hour's ploughing will be lost." And
+the clergy--how would they bring about such a time? They do not even
+believe that God has a word to his people through them. They think that
+his word is petrified for use in the Bible and Prayer-book; that the
+wise men of old heard so much of the word of God, and have so set it
+down, that there is no need for any more words of the Lord coming to
+the prophets of a land; therefore they look down upon the
+prophesying--that is, the preaching of the word--make light of it, the
+best of them, say these prayers are everything, or all but everything:
+_their_ hearts are not set upon hearing what God the Lord will speak
+that they may speak it abroad to his people again. Therefore it is no
+wonder if the church bells are obedient only to the clock, are no
+longer subject to the spirit of the minister, and have nothing to do in
+telegraphing between heaven and earth. They make little of this part of
+their duty; and no wonder, if what is to be spoken must remain such as
+they speak. They put the Church for God, and the prayers which are the
+word of man to God, for the word of God to man. But when the prophets
+see no vision, how should they have any word to speak?
+
+These thoughts were passing through my mind when my eye fell upon my
+guide. She was seated against the south wall of the tower, on a stool,
+I thought, or small table. While I was wandering about the church she
+had taken her stocking and wires out of her pocket, and was now
+knitting busily. How her needles did go! Her eyes never regarded them,
+however, but, fixed on the slabs that paved the tower at a yard or two
+from her feet, seemed to be gazing far out to sea, for they had an
+infinite objectless outlook. To try her, I took for the moment the
+position of an accuser.
+
+"So you don't mind working in church?" I said.
+
+When I spoke she instantly rose, her eyes turned as from the far
+sea-waves to my face, and light came out of them. With a smile she
+answered--
+
+"The church knows me, sir."
+
+"But what has that to do with it?"
+
+"I don't think she minds it. We are told to be diligent in business,
+you know, sir."
+
+"Yes, but it does not say in church and out of church. You could be
+diligent somewhere else, couldn't you?"
+
+As soon as I said this, I began to fear she would think I meant it. But
+she only smiled and said, "It won't hurt she, sir; and my good man, who
+does all he can to keep her tidy, is out at toes and heels, and if I
+don't keep he warm he'll be laid up, and then the church won't be kep'
+nice, sir, till he's up again."
+
+I was tempted to go on.
+
+"But you could have sat down outside--there are some nice gravestones
+near--and waited till I came out."
+
+"But what's the church for, sir? The sun's werry hot to-day, sir; and
+Mr. Shepherd, he say, sir, that the church is like the shadow of a
+great rock in a weary land. So, you see, if I was to sit out in the
+sun, instead of comin' in here to the cool o' the shadow, I wouldn't be
+takin' the church at her word. It does my heart good to sit in the old
+church, sir. There's a something do seem to come out o' the old walls
+and settle down like the cool o' the day upon my old heart that's
+nearly tired o' crying, and would fain keep its eyes dry for the rest
+o' the journey. My old man's stockin' won't hurt the church, sir, and,
+bein' a good deed as I suppose it is, it's none the worse for the
+place. I think, if He was to come by wi' the whip o' small cords, I
+wouldn't be afeared of his layin' it upo' my old back. Do you think he
+would, sir?"
+
+Thus driven to speak as I thought, I made haste to reply, more
+delighted with the result of my experiment than I cared to let her know.
+
+"Indeed I do not. I was only talking. It is but selfish, cheating, or
+ill-done work that the church's Master drives away. All our work ought
+to be done in the shadow of the church."
+
+"I thought you be only having a talk about it, sir," she said, smiling
+her sweet old smile. "Nobody knows what this old church is to me."
+
+Now the old woman had a good husband, apparently: the sorrows which had
+left their mark even upon her smile, must have come from her family, I
+thought.
+
+"You have had a family?" I said, interrogatively.
+
+"I've had thirteen," she answered. "Six bys and seven maidens."
+
+"Why, you are rich!" I returned. "And where are they all?"
+
+"Four maidens be lying in the churchyard, sir; two be married, and one
+be down in the mill, there."
+
+"And your boys?"
+
+"One of them be lyin' beside his sisters--drownded afore my eyes, sir.
+Three o' them be at sea, and two o' them in it, sir."
+
+At sea! I thought. What a wide _where_! As vague to the imagination,
+almost, as _in the other world_. How a mother's thoughts must go
+roaming about the waste, like birds that have lost their nest, to find
+them!
+
+As this thought kept me silent for a few moments, she resumed.
+
+"It be no wonder, be it, sir? that I like to creep into the church with
+my knitting. Many's the stormy night, when my husband couldn't keep
+still, but would be out on the cliffs or on the breakwater, for no good
+in life, but just to hear the roar of the waves that he could only see
+by the white of them, with the balls o' foam flying in his face in the
+dark--many's the such a night that I have left the house after he was
+gone, with this blessed key in my hand, and crept into the old church
+here, and sat down where I'm sittin' now--leastways where I was sittin'
+when your reverence spoke to me--and hearkened to the wind howling
+about the place. The church windows never rattle, sir--like the cottage
+windows, as I suppose you know, sir. Somehow, I feel safe in the
+church."
+
+"But if you had sons at sea," said I, again wishing to draw her out,
+"it would not he of much good to you to feel safe yourself, so long as
+they were in danger."
+
+"O! yes, it be, sir. What's the good of feeling safe yourself but it
+let you know other people be safe too? It's when you don't feel safe
+yourself that you feel other people ben't safe."
+
+"But," I said--and such confidence I had from what she had already
+uttered, that I was sure the experiment was not a cruel one--"some of
+your sons _were_ drowned for all that you say about their safety."
+
+"Well, sir," she answered, with a sigh, "I trust they're none the less
+safe for that. It would be a strange thing for an old woman like me,
+well-nigh threescore and ten, to suppose that safety lay in not being
+drownded. Why, they might ha' been cast on a desert island, and wasted
+to skin an' bone, and got home again wi' the loss of half the wits they
+set out with. Wouldn't that ha' been worse than being drownded right
+off? And that wouldn't ha' been the worst, either. The church she seem
+to tell me all the time, that for all the roaring outside, there be
+really no danger after all. What matter if they go to the bottom? What
+is the bottom of the sea, sir? You bein' a clergyman can tell that,
+sir. I shouldn't ha' known it if I hadn't had bys o' my own at sea,
+sir. But you can tell, sir, though you ain't got none there."
+
+And though she was putting her parson to his catechism, the smile that
+returned on her face was as modest as if she had only been listening to
+his instruction. I had not long to look for my answer.
+
+"The hollow of his hand," I said, and said no more.
+
+"I thought you would know it, sir," she returned, with a little glow of
+triumph in her tone. "Well, then, that's just what the church tells me
+when I come in here in the stormy nights. I bring my knitting then too,
+sir, for I can knit in the dark as well as in the light almost; and
+when they come home, if they do come home, they're none the worse that
+I went to the old church to pray for them. There it goes roaring about
+them poor dears, all out there; and their old mother sitting still as a
+stone almost in the quiet old church, a caring for them. And then it do
+come across me, sir, that God be a sitting in his own house at home,
+hearing all the noise and all the roaring in which his children are
+tossed about in the world, watching it all, letting it drown some o'
+them and take them back to him, and keeping it from going too far with
+others of them that are not quite ready for that same. I have my
+thoughts, you see, sir, though I be an old woman; and not nice to look
+at."
+
+I had come upon a genius. How nature laughs at our schools sometimes!
+Education, so-called, is a fine thing, and might be a better thing; but
+there is an education, that of life, which, when seconded by a pure
+will to learn, leaves the schools behind, even as the horse of the
+desert would leave behind the slow pomposity of the common-fed goose.
+For life is God's school, and they that will listen to the Master there
+will learn at God's speed. For one moment, I am ashamed to say, I was
+envious of Shepherd, and repined that, now old Rogers was gone, I had
+no such glorious old stained-glass window in my church to let in the
+eternal upon my light-thirsty soul. I must say for myself that the
+feeling lasted but for a moment, and that no sooner had the shadow of
+it passed and the true light shined after it, than I was heartily
+ashamed of it. Why should not Shepherd have the old woman as well as I?
+True, Shepherd was more of what would now be called a ritualist than I;
+true, I thought my doctrine simpler and therefore better than his; but
+was this any reason why I should have all the grand people to minister
+to in my parish! Recovering myself, I found her last words still in my
+ears.
+
+"You are very nice to look at," I said. "You must not find fault with
+the work of God, because you would like better to be young and pretty
+than to be as you now are. Time and time's rents and furrows are all
+his making and his doing. God makes nothing ugly."
+
+"Are you quite sure of that, sir?"
+
+I paused. Such a question from such a woman "must give us pause." And,
+as I paused, the thought of certain animals flashed into my mind and I
+could not insist that God had never made anything ugly.
+
+"No. I am not sure of it," I answered. For of all things my soul
+recoiled from, any professional pretence of knowing more than I did
+know seemed to me the most repugnant to the spirit and mind of the
+Master, whose servants we are, or but the servants of mere priestly
+delusion and self-seeking. "But if he does," I went on to say, "it must
+be that we may see what it is like, and therefore not like it."
+
+Then, unwilling all at once to plunge with her into such an abyss as
+the question opened, I turned the conversation to an object on which my
+eyes had been for some time resting half-unconsciously. It was the sort
+of stool or bench on which my guide had been sitting. I now thought it
+was some kind of box or chest. It was curiously carved in old oak, very
+much like the ends of the benches and book-boards.
+
+"What is that you were sitting on?" I asked. "A chest or what?"
+
+"It be there when we come to this place, and that be nigh fifty years
+agone, sir. But what it be, you'll be better able to tell than I be,
+sir."
+
+"Perhaps a chest for holding the communion-plate in old time," I said.
+"But how should it then come to be banished to the tower?"
+
+"No, sir; it can't be that. It be some sort of ancient musical piano, I
+be thinking."
+
+I stooped and saw that its lid was shaped like the cover of an organ.
+With some difficulty I opened it; and there, to be sure, was a row of
+huge keys, fit for the fingers of a Cyclops. I pressed upon them, one
+after another, but no sound followed. They were stiff to the touch; and
+once down, so they mostly remained until lifted again. I looked if
+there was any sign of a bellows, thinking it must have been some
+primitive kind of reed-instrument, like what we call a seraphine or
+harmonium now-a-days. But there was no hole through which there could
+have been any communication with or from a bellows, although there
+might have been a small one inside. There were, however, a dozen little
+round holes in the fixed part of the top, which might afford some clue
+to the mystery of its former life. I could not find any way of reaching
+the inside of it, so strongly was it put together; therefore I was
+left, I thought, to the efforts of my imagination alone for any hope of
+discovery with regard to the instrument, seeing further observation was
+impossible. But here I found that I was mistaken in two important
+conclusions, the latter of which depended on the former. The first of
+these was that it was an instrument: it was only one end of an
+instrument; therefore, secondly, there might be room for observation
+still. But I found this out by accident, which has had a share in most
+discoveries, and which, meaning a something that falls into our hands
+unlocked for, is so far an unobjectionable word even to the man who
+does not believe in chance. I had for the time given up the question as
+insoluble, and was gazing about the place, when, glancing up at the
+holes in the ceiling through which the bell-ropes went, I spied two or
+three thick wires hanging through the same ceiling close to the wall,
+and right over the box with the keys. The vague suspicion of a
+discovery dawned upon me.
+
+"Have you got the key of the tower?" I asked.
+
+"No, sir. But I'll run home for it at once," she answered. And rising,
+she went out in haste.
+
+"Run!" thought I, looking after her. "It is a word of the will and the
+feeling, not of the body." But I was mistaken. The dear old creature
+had no sooner got outside of the church-yard, within which, I presume,
+she felt that she must be decorous, than she did run, and ran well too.
+I was on the point of starting after her at full speed, to prevent her
+from hurting herself, but reflecting that her own judgment ought to be
+as good as mine in such a case, I returned, and sitting down on her
+seat, awaited her reappearance, gazing at the ceiling. There I either
+saw or imagined I saw signs of openings corresponding in number and
+position with those in the lid under me. In about three minutes the old
+woman returned, panting but not distressed, with a great crooked old
+key in her hand. Why are all the keys of a church so crooked? I did not
+ask her that question, though. What I said to her, was--
+
+"You shouldn't run like that. I am in no hurry."
+
+"Be you not, sir? I thought, by the way you spoke, you be taken with a
+longing to get a-top o' the tower, and see all about you like. For you
+see, sir, fond as I be of the old church, I du feel sometimes as if
+she'd smother me; and then nothing will do but I must get at the top of
+the old tower. And then, what with the sun, if there be any sun, and
+what with the fresh air which there always be up there, sir,--it du
+always be fresh up there, sir," she repeated, "I come back down again
+blessing the old church for its tower."
+
+As she spoke she was toiling up the winding staircase after me, where
+there was just room enough for my shoulders to get through by turning
+themselves a little across the lie of the steps. They were very high,
+but she kept up with me bravely, bearing out her statement that she was
+no stranger to them. As I ascended, however, I was not thinking of her,
+but of what she had said. Strange to tell, the significance of the
+towers or spires of our churches had never been clear to me before.
+True, I was quite awake to their significance, at least to that of the
+spires, as fingers pointing ever upwards to
+
+  "regions mild of calm and serene air,
+  Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot,
+  Which men call Earth;"
+
+but I had not thought of their symbolism as lifting one up above the
+church itself into a region where no church is wanted because the Lord
+God almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.
+
+Happy church indeed, if it destroys the need of itself by lifting men
+up into the eternal kingdom! Would that I and all her servants lived
+pervaded with the sense of this her high end, her one high calling! We
+need the church towers to remind us that the mephitic airs in the
+church below are from the churchyard at its feet, which so many take
+for the church, worshipping over the graves and believing in death--or
+at least in the material substance over which alone death hath power.
+Thus the church, even in her corruption, lifts us out of her
+corruption, sending us up her towers and her spires to admonish us that
+she too lives in the air of truth: that her form too must pass away,
+while the truth that is embodied in her lives beyond forms and customs
+and prejudices, shining as the stars for ever and ever. He whom the
+church does not lift up above the church is not worthy to be a
+doorkeeper therein.
+
+Such thoughts passed through me, satisfied me, and left me peaceful, so
+that before I had reached the top, I was thanking the Lord--not for his
+church-tower, but for his sexton's wife. The old woman was a jewel. If
+her husband was like her, which was too much to expect--if he believed
+in her, it would be enough, quite--then indeed the little child, who
+answered on being questioned thereanent, as the Scotch would say, that
+the three orders of ministers in the church were the parson, clerk, and
+sexton, might not be so far wrong in respect of this individual case.
+So in the ascent, and the thinking associated therewith, I forgot all
+about the special object for which I had requested the key of the
+tower, and led the way myself up to the summit, where stepping out of a
+little door, which being turned only heavenwards had no pretence for,
+or claim upon a curiously crooked key, but opened to the hand laid upon
+the latch, I thought of the words of the judicious Hooker, that "the
+assembling of the church to learn" was "the receiving of angels
+descended from above;" and in such a whimsical turn as our thoughts
+will often take when we are not heeding them, I wondered for a moment
+whether that was why the upper door was left on the latch, forgetting
+that that could not be of much use, if the door in the basement was
+kept locked with the crooked key. But the whole suggested something
+true about my own heart and that of my fellows, if not about the
+church: Revelation is not enough, the open trap-door is not enough, if
+the door of the heart is not open likewise.
+
+As soon, however, as I stepped out upon the roof of the tower, I forgot
+again all that had thus passed through my mind, swift as a dream. For,
+filling the west, lay the ocean beneath, with a dark curtain of storm
+hanging in perpendicular lines over part of its horizon, and on the
+other side was the peaceful solid land, with its numberless shades of
+green, its heights and hollows, its farms and wooded vales--there was
+not much wood--its scattered villages and country dwellings, lighted
+and shadowed by the sun and the clouds. Beyond lay the blue heights of
+Dartmoor. And over all, bathing us as it passed, moved the wind, the
+life-bearing spirit of the whole, the servant of the sun. The old woman
+stood beside me, silently enjoying my enjoyment, with a still smile
+that seemed to say in kindly triumph, "Was I not right about the tower
+and the wind that dwells among its pinnacles?" I drank deep of the
+universal flood, the outspread peace, the glory of the sun, and the
+haunting shadow of the sea that lay beyond like the visual image of the
+eternal silence--as it looks to us--that rounds our little earthly life.
+
+There were a good many trees in the church-yard, and as I looked down,
+the tops of them in their richest foliage hid all the graves directly
+below me, except a single flat stone looking up through an opening in
+the leaves, which seemed to have been just made for it to let it see
+the top of the tower. Upon the stone a child was seated playing with a
+few flowers she had gathered, not once looking up to the gilded vanes
+that rose from the four pinnacles at the corners of the tower. I turned
+to the eastern side, and looked over upon the church roof. It lay far
+below--looking very narrow and small, but long, with the four ridges of
+four steep roofs stretching away to the eastern end. It was in
+excellent repair, for the parish was almost all in one lord's
+possession, and he was proud of his church: between them he and Mr.
+Shepherd had made it beautiful to behold and strong to endure.
+
+When I turned to look again, the little child was gone. Some butterfly
+fancy had seized her, and she was away. A little lamb was in her place,
+nibbling at the grass that grew on the side of the next mound. And when
+I looked seaward there was a sloop, like a white-winged sea-bird,
+rounding the end of a high projecting rock from the south, to bear up
+the little channel that led to the gates of the harbour canal. Out of
+the circling waters it had flown home, not from a long voyage, but
+hardly the less welcome therefore to those that waited and looked for
+her signal from the barrier rock.
+
+Reentering by the angels' door to descend the narrow cork-screw stair,
+so dark and cool, I caught a glimpse, one turn down, by the feeble
+light that came through its chinks after it was shut behind us, of a
+tiny maiden-hair fern growing out of the wall. I stopped, and said to
+the old woman--
+
+"I have a sick daughter at home, or I wouldn't rob your tower of this
+lovely little thing."
+
+"Well, sir, what eyes you have! I never saw the thing before. Do take
+it home to miss. It'll do her good to see it. I be main sorry to hear
+you've got a sick maiden. She ben't a bedlar, be she, sir?"
+
+I was busy with my knife getting out all the roots I could without
+hurting them, and before I had succeeded I had remembered Turner's
+using the word.
+
+"Not quite that," I answered, "but she can't even sit up, and must be
+carried everywhere."
+
+"Poor dear! Everyone has their troubles, sir. The sea's been mine."
+
+She continued talking and asking kind questions about Connie as we went
+down the stair. Not till she opened a little door I had passed without
+observing it as we came up, was I reminded of my first object in
+ascending the tower. For this door revealed a number of bells hanging
+in silent power in the brown twilight of the place. I entered
+carefully, for there were only some planks laid upon the joists to keep
+one's feet from going through the ceiling. In a few moments I had
+satisfied myself that my conjecture about the keys below was correct.
+The small iron rods I had seen from beneath hung down from this place.
+There were more of them hanging shorter above, and there was yet enough
+of a further mechanism remaining to prove that those keys, by means of
+the looped and cranked rods, had been in connection with hammers, one
+of them indeed remaining also, which struck the bells, so that a tune
+could be played upon them as upon any other keyed instrument. This was
+the first contrivance of the kind I had ever seen, though I have heard
+of it in other churches since.
+
+"If I could find a clever blacksmith in the neighbourhood, now," I said
+to myself, "I would get this all repaired, so that it should not
+interfere with the bell-ringing when the ringers were to be had, and
+yet Shepherd could play a psalm tune to his parish at large when he
+pleased." For Shepherd was a very fair musician, and gave a good deal
+of time to the organ. "It's a grand notion, to think of him sitting
+here in the gloom, with that great musical instrument towering above
+him, whence he sends forth the voice of gladness, almost of song to his
+people, while they are mowing the grass, binding the sheaves, or gazing
+abroad over the stormy ocean in doubt, anxiety, and fear. 'There's the
+parson at his bells,' they would say, and stop and listen; and some
+phrase might sink into their hearts, waking some memory, or giving
+birth to some hope or faint aspiration. I will see what can be done."
+Having come to this conclusion, I left the abode of the bells,
+descended to the church, bade my conductress good morning, saying I
+would visit her soon in her own house, and bore home to my child the
+spoil which, without kirk-rapine, I had torn from the wall of the
+sanctuary. By this time the stormy veil had lifted from the horizon,
+and the sun was shining in full power without one darkening cloud.
+
+Ere I left the churchyard I would have a glance at the stone which ever
+seemed to lie gazing up at the tower. I soon found it, because it was
+the only one in that quarter from which I could see the top of the
+tower. It recorded the life and death of an aged pair who had been
+married fifty years, concluding with the couplet--
+
+"A long time this may seem to be, But it did not seem long to we."
+
+The whole story of a human life lay in that last verse. True, it was
+not good grammar; but they had got through fifty years of wedded life
+probably without any knowledge of grammar to harmonise or to shorten
+them, and I daresay, had they been acquainted with the lesson he had
+put into their dumb mouths, they would have been aware of no ground of
+quarrel with the poetic stone-cutter, who most likely had thrown the
+verses in when he made his claim for the stone and the cutting. Having
+learnt this one by heart, I went about looking for anything more in the
+shape of sepulchral flora that might interest or amuse my crippled
+darling; nor had I searched long before I found one, the sole but
+triumphant recommendation of which was the thorough "puzzle-headedness"
+of its construction. I quite reckoned on seeing Connie trying to make
+it out, looking as bewildered over its excellent grammar, as the poet
+of the other ought to have looked over his rhymes, ere he gave in to
+the use of the nominative after a preposition.
+
+  "If you could view the heavenly shore,
+  Where heart's content you hope to find,
+  You would not murmur were you gone before,
+  But grieve that you are left behind."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+CONNIE'S WATCH-TOWER.
+
+
+As I walked home, the rush of the rising tide was in my ears. To my
+fancy, the ocean, awaking from a swoon in which its life had ebbed to
+its heart, was sending that life abroad to its extremities, and waves
+breaking in white were the beats of its reviving pulse, the flashes of
+returning light. But so gentle was its motion, and so lovely its hue,
+that I could not help contrasting it with its reflex in the mind of her
+who took refuge from the tumult of its noises in the hollow of the old
+church. To her, let it look as blue as the sky, as peaceful and as
+moveless, it was a wild, reckless, false, devouring creature, a prey to
+its own moods, and to that of the blind winds which, careless of
+consequences, urged it to raving fury. Only, while the sea took this
+form to her imagination, she believed in that which held the sea, and
+knew that, when it pleased God to part his confining fingers, there
+would he no more sea.
+
+When I reached home, I went straight to Connie's room. Now the house
+was one of a class to every individual of which, whatever be its style
+or shape, I instantly become attached almost as if it possessed a
+measure of the life which it has sheltered. This class of human
+dwellings consists of the houses that have _grown_. They have not been,
+built after a straight-up-and-down model of uninteresting convenience
+or money-loving pinchedness. They must have had some plan, good, bad,
+or indifferent, as the case may be, at first, I suppose; but that plan
+they have left far behind, having grown with the necessities or
+ambitions of succeeding possessors, until the fact that they have a
+history is as plainly written on their aspect as on that of any you or
+daughter of Adam. These are the houses which the fairies used to haunt,
+and if there is any truth in ghost-stories, the houses which ghosts
+will yet haunt; and hence perhaps the sense of soothing comfort which
+pervades us when we cross their thresholds. You do not know, the moment
+you have cast a glance about the hall, where the dining-room,
+drawing-room, and best bedroom are. You have got it all to find out,
+just as the character of a man; and thus had I to find out this house
+of my friend Shepherd. It had formerly been a kind of manor-house,
+though altogether unlike any other manor-house I ever saw; for after
+exercising all my constructive ingenuity reversed in pulling it to
+pieces in my mind, I came to the conclusion that the germ-cell of it
+was a cottage of the simplest sort which had grown by the addition of
+other cells, till it had reached the development in which we found it.
+
+I have said that the dining-room was almost on the level of the shore.
+Certainly some of the flat stones that coped the low wall in front of
+it were thrown into the garden before the next winter by the waves. But
+Connie's room looked out on a little flower-garden almost on the downs,
+only sheltered a little by the rise of a short grassy slope above it.
+This, however, left the prospect, from her window down the bay and out
+to sea, almost open. To reach this room I had now to go up but one
+simple cottage stair; for the door of the house entered on the first
+floor, that is, as regards the building, midway between heaven and
+earth. It had a large bay-window; and in this window Connie was lying
+on her couch, with the lower sash wide open, through which the breeze
+entered, smelling of sea-weed tempered with sweet grasses and the
+wall-flowers and stocks that were in the little plot under it. I
+thought I could see an improvement in her already. Certainly she looked
+very happy.
+
+"O, papa!" she said, "isn't it delightful?"
+
+"What is, my dear?"
+
+"O, everything. The wind, and the sky, and the sea, and the smell of
+the flowers. Do look at that sea-bird. His wings are like the barb of a
+terrible arrow. How he goes undulating, neck and body, up and down as
+he flies. I never felt before that a bird moves his wings. It always
+looked as if the wings flew with the bird. But I see the effort in him."
+
+"An easy effort, though, I should certainly think."
+
+"No doubt. But I see that he chooses and means to fly, and so does it.
+It makes one almost reconciled to the idea of wings. Do angels really
+have wings, papa?"
+
+"It is generally so represented, I think, in the Bible. But whether it
+is meant as a natural fact about them, is more than I take upon me to
+decide. For one thing, I should have to examine whether in simple
+narrative they are ever represented with them, as, I think, in records
+of visions they are never represented without them. But wings are very
+beautiful things, and I do not exactly see why you should need
+reconciling to them."
+
+Connie gave a little shrug of her shoulders.
+
+"I don't like the notion of them growing out at my shoulder-blades. And
+however would you get on your clothes? If you put them over your wings,
+they would be of no use, and would, besides, make you hump-backed; and
+if you did not, everything would have to be buttoned round the roots of
+them. You could not do it yourself, and even on Wynnie I don't think I
+could bear to touch the things--I don't mean the feathers, but the
+skinny, folding-up bits of them."
+
+I laughed at her fastidious fancy.
+
+"You want to fly, I suppose?" I said.
+
+"O, yes; I should like that."
+
+"And you don't want to have wings?"
+
+"Well, I shouldn't mind the wings exactly; but however would one be
+able to keep them nice?"
+
+"There you go; starting from one thing to another, like a real bird
+already. When you can't answer one thing, off to another, and, from
+your new perch on the hawthorn, talk as if you were still on the
+topmost branch of the lilac!"
+
+"O, yes, papa! That's what I've heard you say to mamma twenty times."
+
+"And did I ever say to your mamma anything but the truth? or to you
+either, you puss?"
+
+I had not yet discovered that when I used this epithet to my Connie,
+she always thought she had gone too far. She looked troubled. I
+hastened to relieve her.
+
+"When women have wings," I said, "their logic will be good."
+
+"How do you make that out, papa?" she asked, a little re-assured.
+
+"Because then every shadow of feeling that turns your speech aside from
+the straight course will be recognised in that speech; the whole
+utterance will be instinct not only with the meaning of what you are
+thinking, but with the reflex of the forces in you that make the
+utterance take this or that shape; just as to a perfect palate, the
+source and course of a stream would be revealed in every draught of its
+water.
+
+"I have just a glimmering of your meaning, papa. Would you like to have
+wings?"
+
+"I should like to fly like a bird, to swim like a fish, to gallop like
+a horse, to creep like a serpent, but I suspect the good of all these
+is to be got without doing any of them."
+
+"I know what you mean now, but I can't put it in words."
+
+"I mean by a perfect sympathy with the creatures that do these things:
+what it may please God to give to ourselves, we can quite comfortably
+leave to him. A higher stratum of the same kind is the need we feel of
+knowing our fellow-creatures through and through, of walking into and
+out of their worlds as if we were, because we are, perfectly at home in
+them.--But I am talking what the people who do not understand such
+things lump all together as mysticism, which is their name for a kind
+of spiritual ash-pit, whither they consign dust and stones, never
+asking whether they may not be gold-dust and rubies, all in a
+heap.--You had better begin to think about getting out, Connie."
+
+"Think about it, papa! I have been thinking about it ever since
+daylight."
+
+"I will go and see what your mother is doing then, and if she is ready
+to go out with us."
+
+In a few moments all was arranged. Without killing more than a snail or
+two, which we could not take time to beware of, Walter and I--finding
+that the window did not open down to the ground in French fashion, for
+which there were two good reasons, one the fierceness of the winds in
+winter, the other, the fact that the means of egress were elsewise
+provided--lifted the sofa, Connie and all, out over the window-sill,
+and then there was only a little door in the garden-wall to get her
+through before we found ourselves upon the down. I think the ascent of
+this hill was the first experience I had--a little to my humiliation,
+nothing to my sorrow--that I was descending another hill. I had to set
+down the precious burden rather oftener before we reached the brow of
+the cliffs than would have been necessary ten years before. But this
+was all right, and the newly-discovered weakness then was strength to
+the power which carries me about on my two legs now. It is all right
+still. I shall be stronger by and by.
+
+We carried her high enough for her to see the brilliant waters lying
+many feet below her, with the sea-birds of which we had talked winging
+their undulating way between heaven and ocean. It is when first you
+have a chance of looking a bird in the face on the wing that you know
+what the marvel of flight is. There it hangs or rests, which you
+please, borne up, as far as eye or any of the senses can witness, by
+its own will alone. This Connie, quicker than I in her observation of
+nature, had already observed. Seated on the warm grass by her side,
+while neither talked, but both regarded the blue spaces, I saw one of
+those same barb-winged birds rest over my head, regarding me from
+above, as if doubtful whether I did not afford some claim to his theory
+of treasure-trove. I knew at once that what Connie had been saying to
+me just before was true.
+
+She lay silent a long time. I too was silent. At length I spoke.
+
+"Are you longing to be running about amongst the rocks, my Connie?"
+
+"No, papa; not a bit. I don't know how it is, but I don't think I ever
+wished much for anything I knew I could not have. I am enjoying
+everything more than I can tell you. I wish Wynnie were as happy as I
+am."
+
+"Why? Do you think she's not happy, my dear?"
+
+"That doesn't want any thinking, papa. You can see that."
+
+"I am afraid you're right, Connie. What do you think is the cause of
+it?"
+
+"I think it is because she can't wait. She's always going out to meet
+things; and then when they're not there waiting for her, she thinks
+they're nowhere. But I always think her way is finer than mine. If
+everybody were like me, there wouldn't be much done in the world, would
+there, papa?"
+
+"At all events, my dear, your way is wise for you, and I am glad you do
+not judge your sister."
+
+"Judge Wynnie, papa! That would be cool impudence. She's worth ten of
+me. Don't you think, papa," she added, after a pause, "that if Mary had
+said the smallest word against Martha, as Martha did against Mary,
+Jesus would have had a word to say on Martha's side next?"
+
+"Indeed I do, my dear. And I think that did not sit very long without
+asking Jesus if she mightn't go and help her sister. There is but one
+thing needful--that is, the will of God; and when people love that
+above everything, they soon come to see that to everything else there
+are two sides, and that only the will of God gives fair play, as we
+call it, to both of them."
+
+Another silence followed. Then Connie spoke.
+
+"Is it not strange, papa, that the only thine here that makes me want
+to get up to look, is nothing of all the grand things round about me? I
+am just lying like the convex mirror in the school-room at home,
+letting them all paint themselves in me."
+
+"What is it then that makes you wish to get up and go and see?" I asked
+with real curiosity.
+
+"Do you see down there--away across the bay--amongst the rocks at the
+other side, a man sitting sketching?"
+
+I looked for some time before I could discover him.
+
+"Your sight is good, Connie: I see the man, but I could not tell what
+he was doing."
+
+"Don't you see him lifting his head every now and then for a moment,
+and then keeping it down for a longer while?"
+
+"I cannot distinguish that. But then I am shortsighted rather, you
+know."
+
+"I wonder how you see so many little things that nobody else seems to
+notice, then, papa."
+
+"That is because I have trained myself to observe. The degree of power
+in the sight is of less consequence than the habit of seeing. But you
+have not yet told me what it is that makes you desirous of getting up."
+
+"I want to look over his shoulder, and see what he is doing. Is it not
+strange that in the midst of all this plenty of beautifulness, I should
+want to rise to look at a few lines and scratches, or smears of colour,
+upon a bit of paper?"
+
+"No, my dear; I don't think it is strange. There a new element of
+interest is introduced--the human. No doubt there is deep humanity in
+all this around us. No doubt all the world, in all its moods, is human,
+as those for whose abode and instruction it was made. No doubt, it
+would be void of both beauty and significance to our eyes, were it not
+that it is one crowd of pictures of the human mind, blended in one
+living fluctuating whole. But these meanings are there in solution as
+it were. The individual is a centre of crystallisation to this
+solution. Around him meanings gather, are separated from other
+meanings; and if he be an artist, by which I mean true painter, true
+poet, or true musician, as the case may be he so isolates and
+represents them, that we see them--not what nature shows to us, but
+what nature has shown, to him, determined by his nature and choice.
+With it is mingled therefore so much of his own individuality,
+manifested both in this choice and certain modifications determined by
+his way of working, that you have not only a representation of an
+aspect of nature, as far as that may be with limited powers and
+materials, but a revelation of the man's own mind and nature.
+Consequently there is a human interest in every true attempt to
+reproduce nature, an interest of individuality which does not belong to
+nature herself, who is for all and every man. You have just been saying
+that you were lying there like a convex mirror reflecting all nature
+around you. Every man is such a convex mirror; and his drawing, if he
+can make one, is an attempt to show what is in this little mirror of
+his, kindled there by the grand world outside. And the human mirrors
+being all differently formed, vary infinitely in what they would thus
+represent of the same scene. I have been greatly interested in looking
+alternately over the shoulders of two artists, both sketching in colour
+the same, absolutely the same scene, both trying to represent it with
+all the truth in their power. How different, notwithstanding, the two
+representations came out!"
+
+"I think I understand you, papa. But look a little farther off. Don't
+you see over the top of another rock a lady's bonnet. I do believe
+that's Wynnie. I know she took her box of water-colours out with her
+this morning, just before you came home. Dora went with her."
+
+"Can't you tell by her ribbons, Connie? You seem sharp-sighted enough
+to see her face if she would show it. I don't even see the bonnet. If I
+were like some people I know, I should feel justified in denying its
+presence, attributing the whole to your fancy, and refusing anything to
+superiority of vision."
+
+"That wouldn't be like you, papa."
+
+"I hope not; for I have no fancy for being shut up in my own blindness,
+when other people offer me their eyes to eke out the defects of my own
+with. But here comes mamma at last."
+
+Connie's face brightened as if she had not seen her mother for a
+fortnight. My Ethelwyn always brought the home gladness that her name
+signified with her. She was a centre of radiating peace.
+
+"Mamma, don't you think that's Wynnie's bonnet over that black rock
+there, just beyond where you see that man drawing?"
+
+"You absurd child! How should I know Wynnie's bonnet at this distance?"
+
+"Can't you see the little white feather you gave her out of your
+wardrobe just before we left? She put it in this morning before she
+went out."
+
+"I think I do see something white. But I want you to look out there,
+towards what they call the Chapel Rock, at the other end of that long
+mound they call the breakwater. You will soon see a boat appear full of
+the coast-guard. I saw them going on board just as I left the house to
+come up to you. Their officer came down with his sword, and each of the
+men had a cutlass. I wonder what it can mean."
+
+We looked. But before the boat made its appearance, Connie cried out--
+
+"Look there! What a big boat that is rowing for the land, away
+northwards there!"
+
+I turned my eyes in the direction she indicated, and saw a long boat
+with some half-dozen oars, full of men, rowing hard, apparently for
+some spot on the shore at a considerable distance to the north of our
+bay.
+
+"Ah!" I said, "that boat has something to do with the coast-guard and
+their cutlasses. You'll see that, as soon as they get out of the bay,
+they will row in the same direction."
+
+So it was. Our boat appeared presently from under the concealment of
+the heights on which we were, and made at full speed after the other
+boat.
+
+"Surely they can't be smugglers," I said. "I thought all that was over
+and done with."
+
+In the course of another twenty minutes, during which we watched their
+progress, both boats had disappeared behind the headland to the
+northward. Then, thinking Connie had had nearly enough of the sea air
+for her first experience of its influences, I went and fetched Walter,
+and we carried her back as we had brought her. She had not been in the
+shadow of her own room for five minutes before she was fast asleep.
+
+It was now nearly time for our early dinner. We always dined early when
+we could, that we might eat along with our children. We were both
+convinced that the only way to make them behave like ladies and
+gentlemen was to have them always with us at meals. We had seen very
+unpleasant results in the children of those who allowed them to dine
+with no other supervision than the nursery afforded: they were a
+constant anxiety and occasional horror to those whom they
+visited--snatching like monkeys, and devouring like jackals, as
+selfishly as if they were mere animals.
+
+"O! we've seen such a nice gentleman!" said Dora, becoming lively under
+the influence of her soup.
+
+"Have you, Dora? Where?"
+
+"Sitting on the rocks, taking a portrait of the sea."
+
+"What makes you say he was a nice gentleman?"
+
+"He had such beautiful boots!" answered Dora, at which there was a
+great laugh about the table.
+
+"O! we must run and tell Connie that," said Harry. "It will make her
+laugh."
+
+"What will you tell Connie, then, Harry?"
+
+"O! what was it, Charlie? I've forgotten."
+
+Another laugh followed at Harry's expense now, and we were all very
+merry, when Dora, who sat opposite to the window, called out, clapping
+her hands--
+
+"There's Niceboots again! There's Niceboots again!"
+
+The same moment the head of a young man appeared over the wall that
+separated the garden from the little beach that lay by the entrance of
+the canal. I saw at once that he must be more than ordinarily tall to
+show his face, for he was not close to the wall. It was a dark
+countenance, with a long beard, which few at that time wore, though now
+it is getting not uncommon, even in my own profession--a noble,
+handsome face, a little sad, with downbent eyes, which, released from
+their more immediate duty towards nature, had now bent themselves upon
+the earth.
+
+"Counting the dewy pebbles, fixed in thought."
+
+"I suppose he's contemplating his boots," said Wynnie, with apparent
+maliciousness.
+
+"That's too bad of you, Wynnie," I said, and the child blushed.
+
+"I didn't mean anything, papa. It was only following up Dora's wise
+discrimination," said Wynnie.
+
+"He is a fine-looking fellow," said I, "and ought, with that face and
+head, to be able to paint good pictures."
+
+"I should like to see what he has done," said Wynnie; "for, by the way
+we were sitting, I should think we were attempting the same thing."
+
+"And what was that then, Wynnie?" I asked.
+
+"A rock," she answered, "that you could not see from where you were
+sitting. I saw you on the top of the cliff."
+
+"Connie said it was you, by your bonnet. She, too, was wishing she
+could look over the shoulder of the artist at work beside you."
+
+"Not beside me. There were yards and yards of solid rock between us."
+
+"Space, you see, in removing things from the beholder, seems always to
+bring them nearer to each other, and the most differing things are
+classed under one name by the man who knows nothing about them. But
+what sort of a rock was it you were trying to draw?"
+
+"A strange-looking, conical rock, that stands alone in front of one of
+the ridges that project from the shore into the water. Three sea-birds,
+with long white wings, were flying about it, and the little waves of
+the rising tide were beating themselves against it and breaking in
+white plashes. So the rock stood between the blue and white below and
+the blue and white above; for, though there were no clouds, the birds
+gave the touches of white to the upper sea."
+
+"Now, Dora," I said, "I don't know if you are old enough to understand
+me; but sometimes little people are long in understanding, just because
+the older people think they can't, and don't try them.--Do you see,
+Dora, why I want you to learn to draw? Look how Wynnie sees things.
+That is, in a great measure, because she draws things, and has, by
+that, learned to watch in order to find out. It is a great thing to
+have your eyes open."
+
+Dora's eyes were large, and she opened them to their full width, as if
+she would take in the universe at their little doors. Whether that
+indicated that she did not in the least understand what I had been
+saying, or that she was in sympathy with it, I cannot tell.
+
+"Now let us go up to Connie, and tell her about the rock and everything
+else you have seen since you went out. We are all her messengers sent
+out to discover things, and bring back news of them."
+
+After a little talk with Connie, I retired to the study, which was on
+the same floor as her room completing, indeed, the whole of that part
+of the house, which, seen from without, looked like a separate
+building; for it had a roof of its own, and stood higher up the rock
+than the rest of the dwelling. Here I began to glance over the books.
+To have the run of another man's library, especially if it has all been
+gathered by himself, is like having a pass-key into the chambers of his
+thought. Only, one must be wary, when he opens them, what marks on the
+books he takes for those of the present owner. A mistake here would
+breed considerable confusion and falsehood in any judgment formed from
+the library. I found, however, one thing plain enough, that Shepherd
+had kept up that love for an older English literature, which had been
+one of the cords to draw us towards each other when we were students
+together. There had been one point on which we especially agreed--that
+a true knowledge of the present, in literature, as in everything else,
+could only be founded upon a knowledge of what had gone before;
+therefore, that any judgment, in regard to the literature of the
+present day, was of no value which was not guided and influenced by a
+real acquaintance with the best of what had gone before, being liable
+to be dazzled and misled by novelty of form and other qualities which,
+whatever might be the real worth of the substance, were, in themselves,
+purely ephemeral. I had taken down a last-century edition of the poems
+of the brothers Fletcher, and, having begun to read a lovely passage in
+"Christ's Victory and Triumph," had gone into what I can only call an
+intellectual rage, at the impudence of the editor, who had altered
+innumerable words and phrases to suit the degenerate taste of his own
+time,--when a knock came to the door, and Charlie entered, breathless
+with eagerness.
+
+"There's the boat with the men with the swords in it, and another boat
+behind them, twice as big."
+
+I hurried out upon the road, and there, close under our windows, were
+the two boats we had seen in the morning, landing their crews on the
+little beach. The second boat was full of weather-beaten men, in all
+kinds of attire, some in blue jerseys, some in red shirts, some in
+ragged coats. One man, who looked their superior, was dressed in blue
+from head to foot.
+
+"What's the matter?" I asked the officer of the coast-guard, a sedate,
+thoughtful-looking man.
+
+"Vessel foundered, sir," he answered. "Sprung a leak on Sunday morning.
+She was laden with iron, and in a heavy ground swell it shifted and
+knocked a hole in her. The poor fellows are worn out with the pump and
+rowing, upon little or nothing to eat."
+
+They were trooping past us by this time, looking rather dismal, though
+not by any means abject.
+
+"What are you going to do with them now?"
+
+"They'll be taken in by the people. We'll get up a little subscription
+for them, but they all belong to the society the sailors have for
+sending the shipwrecked to their homes, or where they want to go."
+
+"Well, here's something to help," I said.
+
+"Thank you, sir. They'll be very glad of it."
+
+"And if there's anything wanted that I can do for them, you must let me
+know."
+
+"I will, sir. But I don't think there will be any occasion to trouble
+you. You are our new clergyman, I believe."
+
+"Not exactly that. Only for a little while, till my friend Mr. Shepherd
+is able to come back to you."
+
+"We don't want to lose Mr. Shepherd, sir. He's what they call high in
+these parts, but he's a great favourite with all the poor people,
+because you see he understands them as if he was of the same flesh and
+blood with themselves--as, for that matter, I suppose we all are."
+
+"If we weren't there would be nothing to say at all. Will any of these
+men be at church to-morrow, do you suppose? I am afraid sailors are not
+much in the way of going to church?"
+
+"I am afraid not. You see they are all anxious to get home. Most likely
+they'll be all travelling to-morrow. It's a pity. It would be a good
+chance for saying something to them that they might think of again. But
+I often think that, perhaps--it's only my own fancy, and I don't set it
+up for anything--that sailors won't be judged exactly like other
+people. They're so knocked about, you see, sir."
+
+"Of course not. Nobody will be judged like any other body. To his own
+Master, who knows all about him, every man stands or falls. Depend upon
+it, God likes fair play, to use a homely phrase, far better than any
+sailor of them all. But that's not exactly the question. It seems to me
+the question is this: shall we, who know what a blessed thing life is
+because we know what God is like, who can trust in him with all our
+hearts because he is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the friend of
+sinners, shall we not try all we can to let them, too, know the
+blessedness of trusting in their Father in heaven? If we could only get
+them to say the Lord's prayer, _meaning_ it, think what that would be!
+Look here! This can't be called bribery, for they are in want of it,
+and it will show them I am friendly. Here's another sovereign. Give
+them my compliments, and say that if any of them happen to be in
+Kilkhaven tomorrow, I shall be quite pleased to welcome them to church.
+Tell them I will give them of my best there if they will come. Make the
+invitation merrily, you know. No long faces and solemn speech. I will
+give them the solemn speech when they come to church. But even there I
+hope God will keep the long face far from me. That is fittest for fear
+and suffering. And the house of God is the casket that holds the
+antidote against all fear and most suffering. But I am preaching my
+sermon on Saturday instead of Sunday, and keeping you from your
+ministration to the poor fellows. Good-bye."
+
+"I will give them your message as near as I can," he said, and we shook
+hands and parted.
+
+This was the first experience we had of the might and battle of the
+ocean. To our eyes it lay quiet as a baby asleep. On that Sunday
+morning there had been no commotion here. Yet now at last, on the
+Saturday morning, home come the conquered and spoiled of the sea. As if
+with a mock she takes all they have, and flings them on shore again,
+with her weeds, and her shells, and her sand. Before the winter was
+over we had learned--how much more of that awful power that surrounds
+the habitable earth! By slow degrees the sense of its might grew upon
+us, first by the vision of its many aspects and moods, and then by more
+awful things that followed; for there are few coasts upon which the sea
+rages so wildly as upon this, the whole force of the Atlantic breaking
+upon it. Even when there is no storm within perhaps hundreds of miles,
+when all is still as a church on the land, the storm that raves
+somewhere out upon the vast waste, will drive the waves in upon the
+shore with such fury that not even a lifeboat could make its way
+through their yawning hollows, and their fierce, shattered, and
+tumbling crests.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+MY FIRST SERMON IN THE SEABOARD PARISH.
+
+
+In the hope that some of the shipwrecked mariners might be present in
+the church the next day, I proceeded to consider my morning's sermon
+for the occasion. There was no difficulty in taking care at the same
+time that it should be suitable to the congregation, whether those
+sailors were there or not. I turned over in my mind several subjects. I
+thought, for instance, of showing them how this ocean that lay watchful
+and ready all about our island, all about the earth, was but a visible
+type or symbol of two other oceans, one very still, the other very
+awful and fierce; in fact, that three oceans surrounded us: one of the
+known world; one of the unseen world, that is, of death; one of the
+spirit--the devouring ocean of evil--and might I not have added yet
+another, encompassing and silencing all the rest--that of truth! The
+visible ocean seemed to make war upon the land, and the dwellers
+thereon. Restrained by the will of God and by him made subject more and
+more to the advancing knowledge of those who were created to rule over
+it, it was yet like a half-tamed beast ever ready to break loose and
+devour its masters. Of course this would have been but one aspect or
+appearance of it--for it was in truth all service; but this was the
+aspect I knew it must bear to those, seafaring themselves or not, to
+whom I had to speak. Then I thought I might show, that its power, like
+that of all things that man is ready to fear, had one barrier over
+which no commotion, no might of driving wind, could carry it, beyond
+which its loudest waves were dumb--the barrier of death. Hitherto and
+no further could its power reach. It could kill the body. It could dash
+in pieces the last little cock-boat to which the man clung, but thus it
+swept the man beyond its own region into the second sea of stillness,
+which we call death, out upon which the thoughts of those that are left
+behind can follow him only in great longings, vague conjectures, and
+mighty faith. Then I thought I could show them how, raving in fear, or
+lying still in calm deceit, there lay about the life of man a far more
+fearful ocean than that which threatened his body; for this would cast,
+could it but get a hold of him, both body and soul into hell--the sea
+of evil, of vice, of sin, of wrong-doing--they might call it by what
+name they pleased. This made war against the very essence of life,
+against God who is the truth, against love, against fairness, against
+fatherhood, motherhood, sisterhood, brotherhood, manhood, womanhood,
+against tenderness and grace and beauty, gathering into one pulp of
+festering death all that is noble, lovely, worshipful in the human
+nature made so divine that the one fearless man, the Lord Jesus Christ,
+shared it with us. This, I thought I might make them understand, was
+the only terrible sea, the only hopeless ocean from whose awful shore
+we must shrink and flee, the end of every voyage upon whose bosom was
+the bottom of its filthy waters, beyond the reach of all that is
+thought or spoken in the light, beyond life itself, but for the hand
+that reaches down from the upper ocean of truth, the hand of the
+Redeemer of men. I thought, I say, for a while, that I could make this,
+not definite, but very real to them. But I did not feel quite confident
+about it. Might they not in the symbolism forget the thing symbolised?
+And would not the symbol itself be ready to fade quite from their
+memory, or to return only in the vaguest shadow? And with the thought I
+perceived a far more excellent way. For the power of the truth lies of
+course in its revelation to the mind, and while for this there are a
+thousand means, none are so mighty as its embodiment in human beings
+and human life. There it is itself alive and active. And amongst these,
+what embodiment comes near to that in him who was perfect man in virtue
+of being at the root of the secret of humanity, in virtue of being the
+eternal Son of God? We are his sons in time: he is his Son in eternity,
+of whose sea time is but the broken sparkle. Therefore, I would talk to
+them about--but I will treat my reader now as if he were not my reader,
+but one of my congregation on that bright Sunday, my first in the
+Seaboard Parish, with the sea outside the church, flashing in the
+sunlight.
+
+While I stood at the lectern, which was in front of the altar-screen, I
+could see little of my congregation, partly from my being on a level
+with them, partly from the necessity for keeping my eyes and thoughts
+upon that which I read. When, however, I rose from prayer in the
+pulpit; then I felt, as usual with me, that I was personally present
+for personal influence with my people, and then I saw, to my great
+pleasure, that one long bench nearly in the middle of the church was
+full of such sunburnt men as could not be mistaken for any but
+mariners, even if their torn and worn garments had not revealed that
+they must be the very men about whom we had been so much interested.
+Not only were they behaving with perfect decorum, but their rough faces
+wore an aspect of solemnity which I do not suppose was by any means
+their usual aspect.
+
+I gave them no text. I had one myself, which was the necessary thing.
+They should have it by and by.
+
+"Once upon a time," I said, "a man went up a mountain, and stayed there
+till it was dark, and stayed on. Now, a man who finds himself on a
+mountain as the sun is going down, especially if he is alone, makes
+haste to get down before it is dark. But this man went up when the sun
+was going down, and, as I say, continued there for a good long while
+after it was dark. You will want to know why. I will tell you. He
+wished to be alone. He hadn't a house of his own. He never had all the
+time he lived. He hadn't even a room of his own into which he could go,
+and bolt the door of it. True, he had kind friends, who gave him a bed:
+but they were all poor people, and their houses were small, and very
+likely they had large families, and he could not always find a quiet
+place to go into. And I dare say, if he had had a room, he would have
+been a little troubled with the children constantly coming to find him;
+for however much he loved them--and no man was ever so fond of children
+as he was--he needed to be left quiet sometimes. So, upon this
+occasion, he went up the mountain just to be quiet. He had been all day
+with a crowd of people, and he felt that it was time to be alone. For
+he had been talking with men all day, which tires and sometimes
+confuses a man's thoughts, and now he wanted to talk with God--for that
+makes a man strong, and puts all the confusion in order again, and lets
+a man know what he is about. So he went to the top of the hill. That
+was his secret chamber. It had no door; but that did not matter--no one
+could see him but God. There he stayed for hours--sometimes, I suppose,
+kneeling in his prayer to God; sometimes sitting, tired with his own
+thinking, on a stone; sometimes walking about, looking forward to what
+would come next--not anxious about it, but contemplating it. For just
+before he came up here, some of the people who had been with him wanted
+to make him a king; and this would not do--this was not what God wanted
+of him, and therefore he got rid of them, and came up here to talk to
+God. It was so quiet up here! The earth had almost vanished. He could
+see just the bare hilltop beneath him, a glimmer below, and the sky and
+the stars over his head. The people had all gone away to their own
+homes, and perhaps next day would hardly think about him at all, busy
+catching fish, or digging their gardens, or making things for their
+houses. But he knew that God would not forget him the next day any more
+than this day, and that God had sent him not to be the king that these
+people wanted him to be, but their servant. So, to make his heart
+strong, I say, he went up into the mountain alone to have a talk with
+his Father. How quiet it all was up here, I say, and how noisy it had
+been down there a little while ago! But God had been in the noise then
+as much as he was in the quiet now--the only difference being that he
+could not then be alone with him. I need not tell you who this man
+was--it was the king of men, the servant of men, the Lord Jesus Christ,
+the everlasting son of our Father in heaven.
+
+"Now this mountain on which he was praying had a small lake at the foot
+of it--that is, about thirteen miles long, and five miles broad. Not
+wanting even his usual companions to be with him this evening--partly,
+I presume, because they were of the same mind as those who desired to
+take him by force and make him a king--he had sent them away in their
+boat, to go across this water to the other side, where were their homes
+and their families. Now, it was not pitch dark either on the
+mountain-top or on the water down below; yet I doubt if any other man
+than he would have been keen-eyed enough to discover that little boat
+down in the middle of the lake, much distressed by the west wind that
+blew right in their teeth. But he loved every man in it so much, that I
+think even as he was talking to his Father, his eyes would now and then
+go looking for and finding it--watching it on its way across to the
+other side. You must remember that it was a little boat; and there are
+often tremendous storms upon these small lakes with great mountains
+about them. For the wind will come all at once, rushing down through
+the clefts in as sudden a squall as ever overtook a sailor at sea. And
+then, you know, there is no sea-room. If the wind get the better of
+them, they are on the shore in a few minutes, whichever way the wind
+may blow. He saw them worn out at the oar, toiling in rowing, for the
+wind was contrary unto them. So the time for loneliness and prayer was
+over, and the time to go down out of his secret chamber and help his
+brethren was come. He did not need to turn and say good-bye to his
+Father, as if he dwelt on that mountain-top alone: his Father was down
+there on the lake as well. He went straight down. Could not his Father,
+if he too was down on the lake, help them without him? Yes. But he
+wanted him to do it, that they might see that he did it. Otherwise they
+would only have thought that the wind fell and the waves lay down,
+without supposing for a moment that their Master or his Father had had
+anything to do with it. They would have done just as people do
+now-a-days: they think that the help comes of itself, instead of by the
+will of him who determined from the first that men should be helped. So
+the Master went down the hill. When he reached the border of the lake,
+the wind being from the other side, he must have found the waves
+breaking furiously upon the rocks. But that made no difference to him.
+He looked out as he stood alone on the edge amidst the rushing wind and
+the noise of the water, out over the waves under the clear, starry sky,
+saw where the tiny boat was tossed about like a nutshell, and set out."
+
+The mariners had been staring at me up to this point, leaning forward
+on their benches, for sailors are nearly as fond of a good yarn as they
+are of tobacco; and I heard afterwards that they had voted parson's
+yarn a good one. Now, however, I saw one of them, probably more
+ignorant than the others, cast a questioning glance at his neighbour.
+It was not returned, and he fell again into a listening attitude. He
+had no idea of what was coming. He probably thought parson had
+forgotten to say how Jesus had come by a boat.
+
+"The companions of our Lord had not been willing to go away and leave
+him behind. Now, I dare say, they wished more than ever that he had
+been with them--not that they thought he could do anything with a
+storm, only that somehow they would have been less afraid with his face
+to look at. They had seen him cure men of dreadful diseases; they had
+seen him turn water into wine--some of them; they had seen him feed
+five thousand people the day before with five loaves and two small
+fishes; but had one of their number suggested that if he had been with
+them, they would have been safe from the storm, they would not have
+talked any nonsense about the laws of nature, not having learned that
+kind of nonsense, but they would have said that was quite a different
+thing--altogether too much to expect or believe: _nobody_ could make
+the wind mind what it was about, or keep the water from drowning you if
+you fell into it and couldn't swim; or such-like.
+
+"At length, when they were nearly worn out, taking feebler and feebler
+strokes, sometimes missing the water altogether, at other times burying
+their oars in it up to the handles--as they rose on the crest of a huge
+wave, one of them gave a cry, and they all stopped rowing and stared,
+leaning forward to peer through the darkness. And through the spray
+which the wind tore from the tops of the waves and scattered before it
+like dust, they saw, perhaps a hundred yards or so from the boat,
+something standing up from the surface of the water. It seemed to move
+towards them. It was a shape like a man. They all cried out with fear,
+as was natural, for they thought it must be a ghost."
+
+How the faces of the sailors strained towards me at this part of the
+story! I was afraid one of them especially was on the point of getting
+up to speak, as we have heard of sailors doing in church. I went on.
+
+"But then, over the noise of the wind and the waters came the voice
+they knew so well. It said, 'Be of good cheer: it is I. Be not afraid.'
+I should think, between wonder and gladness, they hardly knew for some
+moments where they were or what they were about. Peter was the first to
+recover himself apparently. In the first flush of his delight he felt
+strong and full of courage. 'Lord, if it be thou,' he said, 'bid me
+come unto thee on the water.' Jesus just said, 'Come;' and Peter
+unshipped his oar, and scrambled over the gunwale on to the sea. But
+when he let go his hold of the boat, and began to look about him, and
+saw how the wind was tearing the water, and how it tossed and raved
+between him and Jesus, he began to be afraid. And as soon as he began
+to be afraid he began to sink; but he had, notwithstanding his fear,
+just sense enough to do the one sensible thing; he cried out, 'Lord,
+save me.' And Jesus put out his hand, and took hold of him, and lifted
+him up out of the water, and said to him, 'O thou of little faith,
+wherefore didst thou doubt? And then they got into the boat, and the
+wind fell all at once, and altogether.
+
+"Now, you will not think that Peter was a coward, will you? It wasn't
+that he hadn't courage, but that he hadn't enough of it. And why was it
+that he hadn't enough of it? Because he hadn't faith enough. Peter was
+always very easily impressed with the look of things. It wasn't at all
+likely that a man should be able to walk on the water; and yet Peter
+found himself standing on the water: you would have thought that when
+once he found himself standing on the water, he need not be afraid of
+the wind and the waves that lay between him and Jesus. But they looked
+so ugly that the fearfulness of them took hold of his heart, and his
+courage went. You would have thought that the greatest trial of his
+courage was over when he got out of the boat, and that there was
+comparatively little more ahead of him. Yet the sight of the waves and
+the blast of the boisterous wind were too much for him. I will tell you
+how I fancy it was; and I think there are several instances of the same
+kind of thing in Peter's life. When he got out of the boat, and found
+himself standing on the water, he began to think much of himself for
+being able to do so, and fancy himself better and greater than his
+companions, and an especial favourite of God above them. Now, there is
+nothing that kills faith sooner than pride. The two are directly
+against each other. The moment that Peter grew proud, and began to
+think about himself instead of about his Master, he began to lose his
+faith, and then he grew afraid, and then he began to sink--and that
+brought him to his senses. Then he forgot himself and remembered his
+Master, and then the hand of the Lord caught him, and the voice of the
+Lord gently rebuked him for the smallness of his faith, asking,
+'Wherefore didst thou doubt?' I wonder if Peter was able to read his
+own heart sufficiently well to answer that _wherefore_. I do not think
+it likely at this period of his history. But God has immeasurable
+patience, and before he had done teaching Peter, even in this life, he
+had made him know quite well that pride and conceit were at the root of
+all his failures. Jesus did not point it out to him now. Faith was the
+only thing that would reveal that to him, as well as cure him of it;
+and was, therefore, the only thing he required of him in his rebuke. I
+suspect Peter was helped back into the boat by the eager hands of his
+companions already in a humbler state of mind than when he left it; but
+before his pride would be quite overcome, it would need that same voice
+of loving-kindness to call him Satan, and the voice of the cock to
+bring to his mind his loud boast, and his sneaking denial; nay, even
+the voice of one who had never seen the Lord till after his death, but
+was yet a readier disciple than he--the voice of St. Paul, to rebuke
+him because he dissembled, and was not downright honest. But at the
+last even he gained the crown of martyrdom, enduring all extremes,
+nailed to the cross like his Master, rather than deny his name. This
+should teach us to distrust ourselves, and yet have great hope for
+ourselves, and endless patience with other people. But to return to the
+story and what the story itself teaches us.
+
+"If the disciples had known that Jesus saw them from the top of the
+mountain, and was watching them all the time, would they have been
+frightened at the storm, as I have little doubt they were, for they
+were only fresh-water fishermen, you know? Well, to answer my own
+question"--I went on in haste, for I saw one or two of the sailors with
+an audible answer hovering on their lips--"I don't know that, as they
+then were, it would have made so much difference to them; for none of
+them had risen much above the look of the things nearest them yet. But
+supposing you, who know something about him, were alone on the sea, and
+expecting your boat to be swamped every moment--if you found out all at
+once, that he was looking down at you from some lofty hilltop, and
+seeing all round about you in time and space too, would you be afraid?
+He might mean you to go to the bottom, you know. Would you mind going
+to the bottom with him looking at you? I do not think I should mind it
+myself. But I must take care lest I be boastful like Peter.
+
+"Why should we be afraid of anything with him looking at us who is the
+Saviour of men? But we are afraid of him instead, because we do not
+believe that he is what he says he is--the Saviour of men. We do not
+believe what he offers us is salvation. We think it is slavery, and
+therefore continue slaves. Friends, I will speak to you who think you
+do believe in him. I am not going to say that you do not believe in
+him; but I hope I am going to make you say to yourselves that you too
+deserve to have those words of the Saviour spoken to you that were
+spoken to Peter, 'O ye of little faith!' Floating on the sea of your
+troubles, all kinds of fears and anxieties assailing you, is He not on
+the mountain-top? Sees he not the little boat of your fortunes tossed
+with the waves and the contrary wind? Assuredly he will come to you
+walking on the waters. It may not be in the way you wish, but if not,
+you will say at last, 'This is better.' It may be that he will come in
+a form that will make you cry out for fear in the weakness of your
+faith, as the disciples cried out--not believing any more than they
+did, that it can be he. But will not each of you arouse his courage
+that to you also he may say, as to the woman with the sick daughter
+whose confidence he so sorely tried, 'Great is thy faith'? Will you not
+rouse yourself, I say, that you may do him justice, and cast off the
+slavery of your own dread? O ye of little faith, wherefore will ye
+doubt? Do not think that the Lord sees and will not come. Down the
+mountain assuredly he will come, and you are now as safe in your
+troubles as the disciples were in theirs with Jesus looking on. They
+did not know it, but it was so: the Lord was watching them. And when
+you look back upon your past lives, cannot you see some instances of
+the same kind--when you felt and acted as if the Lord had forgotten
+you, and found afterwards that he had been watching you all the time?
+
+"But the reason why you do not trust him more is that you obey him so
+little. If you would only, ask what God would have you to do, you would
+soon find your confidence growing. It is because you are proud, and
+envious, and greedy after gain, that you do not trust him more. Ah!
+trust him if it were only to get rid of these evil things, and be clean
+and beautiful in heart.
+
+"O sailors with me on the ocean of life, will you, knowing that he is
+watching you from his mountain-top, do and say the things that hurt,
+and wrong, and disappoint him? Sailors on the waters that surround this
+globe, though there be no great mountain that overlooks the little lake
+on which you float, not the less does he behold you, and care for you,
+and watch over you. Will you do that which is unpleasing, distressful
+to him? Will you be irreverent, cruel, coarse? Will you say evil
+things, lie, and delight in vile stories and reports, with his eye on
+you, watching your ship on its watery ways, ever ready to come over the
+waves to help you? It is a fine thing, sailors, to fear nothing; but it
+would be far finer to fear nothing _because_ he is above all, and over
+all, and in you all. For his sake and for his love, give up everything
+bad, and take him for your captain. He will be both captain and pilot
+to you, and steer you safe into the port of glory. Now to God the
+Father," &c.
+
+This is very nearly the sermon I preached that first Sunday morning. I
+followed it up with a short enforcement in the afternoon.
+
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Seaboard Parish Volume 1, by George MacDonald
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