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+Project Gutenberg's The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2, 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 Vol. 2
+
+Author: George MacDonald
+
+Posting Date: March 29, 2014 [EBook #8552]
+Release Date: July, 2005
+First Posted: July 22, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEABOARD PARISH VOL. 2 ***
+
+
+
+
+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. II.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
+
+
+    I. ANOTHER SUNDAY EVENING
+   II. NICEBOOTS
+  III. THE BLACKSMITH
+   IV. THE LIFE-BOAT
+    V. MR. PERCIVALE
+   VI. THE SHADOW OF DEATH
+  VII. AT THE FARM
+ VIII. THE KEEVE
+   IX. THE WALK TO CHURCH
+    X. THE OLD CASTLE
+   XI. JOE AND HIS TROUBLE
+  XII. A SMALL ADVENTURE
+ XIII. THE HARVEST
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+ANOTHER SUNDAY EVENING.
+
+
+In the evening we met in Connie's room, as usual, to have our talk. And
+this is what came out of it.
+
+The window was open. The sun was in the west. We sat a little aside out
+of the course of his radiance, and let him look full into the room.
+Only Wynnie sat back in a dark corner, as if she would get out of his
+way. Below him the sea lay bluer than you could believe even when you
+saw it--blue with a delicate yet deep silky blue, the exquisiteness of
+which was thrown up by the brilliant white lines of its lapping on the
+high coast, to the northward. We had just sat down, when Dora broke out
+with--
+
+"I saw Niceboots at church. He did stare at you, papa, as if he had
+never heard a sermon before."
+
+"I daresay he never heard such a sermon before!" said Connie, with the
+perfect confidence of inexperience and partiality--not to say
+ignorance, seeing she had not heard the sermon herself.
+
+Here Wynnie spoke from her dark corner, apparently forcing herself to
+speak, and thereby giving what seemed an unpleasant tone to what she
+said.
+
+"Well, papa, I don't know what to think. You are always telling us to
+trust in Him; but how can we, if we are not good?"
+
+"The first good thing you can do is to look up to him. That is the
+beginning of trust in him, and the most sensible thing that it is
+possible for us to do. That is faith."
+
+"But it's no use sometimes."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"Because you--I mean I--can't feel good, or care about it at all."
+
+"But is that any ground for saying that it is no use--that he does not
+heed you? that he disregards the look cast up to him? that, till the
+heart goes with the will, he who made himself strong to be the helper
+of the weak, who pities most those who are most destitute--and who so
+destitute as those who do not love what they want to love--except,
+indeed, those who don't want to love?--that, till you are well on
+towards all right by earnestly seeking it, he won't help you? You are
+to judge him from yourself, are you?--forgetting that all the misery in
+you is just because you have not got his grand presence with you?"
+
+I spoke so earnestly as to be somewhat incoherent in words. But my
+reader will understand. Wynnie was silent. Connie, as if partly to help
+her sister, followed on the same side.
+
+"I don't know exactly how to say what I mean, papa, but I wish I could
+get this lovely afternoon, all full of sunshine and blue, into unity
+with all that you teach us about Jesus Christ. I wish this beautiful
+day came in with my thought of him, like the frame--gold and red and
+blue--that you have to that picture of him at home. Why doesn't it?"
+
+"Just because you have not enough of faith in him, my dear. You do not
+know him well enough yet. You do not yet believe that he means you all
+gladness, heartily, honestly, thoroughly."
+
+"And no suffering, papa?"
+
+"I did not say that, my dear. There you are on your couch and can't
+move. But he does mean you such gladness, such a full sunny air and
+blue sea of blessedness that this suffering shall count for little in
+it; nay more, shall be taken in for part, and, like the rocks that
+interfere with the roll of the sea, flash out the white that glorifies
+and intensifies the whole--to pass away by and by, I trust, none the
+less. What a chance you have, my Connie, of believing in him, of
+offering upon his altar!"
+
+"But," said my wife, "are not these feelings in a great measure
+dependent upon the state of one's health? I find it so different when
+the sunshine is inside me as well as outside me."
+
+"Not a doubt of it, my dear. But that is only the more reason for
+rising above all that. From the way some people speak of physical
+difficulties--I don't mean you, wife--you would think that they were
+not merely the inevitable which they are, but the insurmountable which
+they are not. That they are physical and not spiritual is not only a
+great consolation, but a strong argument for overcoming them. For all
+that is physical is put, or is in the process of being put, under the
+feet of the spiritual. Do not mistake me. I do not say you can make
+yourself feel merry or happy when you are in a physical condition which
+is contrary to such mental condition. But you can withdraw from it--not
+all at once; but by practice and effort you can learn to withdraw from
+it, refusing to allow your judgments and actions to be ruled by it. You
+can climb up out of the fogs, and sit quiet in the sunlight on the
+hillside of faith. You cannot be merry down below in the fog, for there
+is the fog; but you can every now and then fly with the dove-wings of
+the soul up into the clear, to remind yourself that all this passes
+away, is but an accident, and that the sun shines always, although it
+may not at any given moment be shining on you. 'What does that matter?'
+you will learn to say. 'It is enough for me to know that the sun does
+shine, and that this is only a weary fog that is round about me for the
+moment. I shall come out into the light beyond presently.' This is
+faith--faith in God, who is the light, and is all in all. I believe
+that the most glorious instances of calmness in suffering are thus
+achieved; that the sufferers really do not suffer what one of us would
+if thrown into their physical condition without the refuge of their
+spiritual condition as well; for they have taken refuge in the inner
+chamber. Out of the spring of their life a power goes forth that
+quenches the flames of the furnace of their suffering, so far at least
+that it does not touch the deep life, cannot make them miserable, does
+not drive them from the possession of their soul in patience, which is
+the divine citadel of the suffering. Do you understand me, Connie?"
+
+"I do, papa. I think perfectly."
+
+"Still less, then, is the fact that the difficulty is physical to be
+used as an excuse for giving way to ill-temper, and, in fact, leaving
+ourselves to be tossed and shaken by every tremble of our nerves. That
+is as if a man should give himself into the hands and will and caprice
+of an organ-grinder, to work upon him, not with the music of the
+spheres, but with the wretched growling of the streets."
+
+"But," said Wynnie, "I have heard you yourself, papa, make excuse for
+people's ill-temper on this very ground, that they were out of health.
+Indeed," she went on, half-crying, "I have heard you do so for myself,
+when you did not know that I was within hearing."
+
+"Yes, my dear, most assuredly. It is no fiction, but a real difference
+that lies between excusing ourselves and excusing other people. No
+doubt the same excuse is just for ourselves that is just for other
+people. But we can do something to put ourselves right upon a higher
+principle, and therefore we should not waste our time in excusing, or
+even in condemning ourselves, but make haste up the hill. Where we
+cannot work--that is, in the life of another--we have time to make all
+the excuse we can. Nay more; it is only justice there. We are not bound
+to insist on our own rights, even of excuse; the wisest thing often is
+to forego them. But we are bound by heaven, earth, and hell to give
+them to other people. And, besides, what a comfort to ourselves to be
+able to say, 'It is true So-and-so was cross to-day. But it wasn't in
+the least that he wasn't friendly, or didn't like me; it was only that
+he had eaten something that hadn't agreed with him. I could see it in
+his eye. He had one of his headaches.' Thus, you see, justice to our
+neighbour, and comfort to ourselves, is one and the same thing. But it
+would be a sad thing to have to think that when we found ourselves in
+the same ungracious condition, from whatever cause, we had only to
+submit to it, saying, 'It is a law of nature,' as even those who talk
+most about laws will not do, when those laws come between them and
+their own comfort. They are ready enough then to call in the aid of
+higher laws, which, so far from being contradictory, overrule the lower
+to get things into something like habitable, endurable condition. It
+may be a law of nature; but what has the Law of the Spirit of Life to
+_propound anent_ it? as the Scotch lawyers would say."
+
+A little pause followed, during which I hope some of us were thinking.
+That Wynnie, at least, was, her next question made evident.
+
+"What you say about a law of nature and a law of the Spirit makes me
+think again how that walking on the water has always been a puzzle to
+me."
+
+"It could hardly be other, seeing that we cannot possibly understand
+it," I answered.
+
+"But I find it so hard to believe. Can't you say something, papa, to
+help me to believe it?"
+
+"I think if you admit what goes before, you will find there is nothing
+against reason in the story."
+
+"Tell me, please, what you mean."
+
+"If all things were made by Jesus, the Word of God, would it be
+reasonable that the water that he had created should be able to drown
+him?"
+
+"It might drown his body."
+
+"It would if he had not the power over it still, to prevent it from
+laying hold of him. But just think for a moment. God is a Spirit.
+Spirit is greater than matter. Spirit makes matter. Think what it was
+for a human body to have such a divine creative power dwelling in it as
+that which dwelt in the human form of Jesus! What power, and influence,
+and utter rule that spirit must have over the body in which it dwells!
+We cannot imagine how much; but if we have so much power over our
+bodies, how much more must the pure, divine Jesus, have had over his! I
+suspect this miracle was wrought, not through anything done to the
+water, but through the power of the spirit over the body of Jesus,
+which was all obedient thereto. I am not explaining the miracle, for
+that I cannot do. One day I think it will be plain common sense to us.
+But now I am only showing you what seems to me to bring us a step
+nearer to the essential region of the miracle, and so far make it
+easier to believe. If we look at the history of our Lord, we shall find
+that, true real human body as his was, it was yet used by his spirit
+after a fashion in which we cannot yet use our bodies. And this is only
+reasonable. Let me give you an instance. You remember how, on the Mount
+of Transfiguration, that body shone so that the light of it illuminated
+all his garments. You do not surely suppose that this shine was
+external--physical light, as we say, _merely?_ No doubt it was physical
+light, for how else would their eyes have seen it? But where did it
+come from? What was its source? I think it was a natural outburst of
+glory from the mind of Jesus, filled with the perfect life of communion
+with his Father--the light of his divine blessedness taking form in
+physical radiance that permeated and glorified all that surrounded him.
+As the body is the expression of the soul, as the face of Jesus himself
+was the expression of the being, the thought, the love of Jesus in like
+manner this radiance was the natural expression of his gladness, even
+in the face of that of which they had been talking--Moses, Elias, and
+he--namely, the decease that he should accomplish at Jerusalem. Again,
+after his resurrection, he convinced the hands, as well as eyes, of
+doubting Thomas, that he was indeed there in the body; and yet that
+body could appear and disappear as the Lord willed. All this is full of
+marvel, I grant you; but probably far more intelligible to us in a
+further state of existence than some of the most simple facts with
+regard to our own bodies are to us now, only that we are so used to
+them that we never think how unintelligible they really are."
+
+"But then about Peter, papa? What you have been saying will not apply
+to Peter's body, you know."
+
+"I confess there is more difficulty there. But if you can suppose that
+such power were indwelling in Jesus, you cannot limit the sphere of its
+action. As he is the head of the body, his church, in all spiritual
+things, so I firmly believe, however little we can understand about it,
+is he in all natural things as well. Peter's faith in him brought even
+Peter's body within the sphere of the outgoing power of the Master. Do
+you suppose that because Peter ceased to be brave and trusting,
+therefore Jesus withdrew from him some sustaining power, and allowed
+him to sink? I do not believe it. I believe Peter's sinking followed
+naturally upon his loss of confidence. Thus he fell away from the life
+of the Master; was no longer, in that way I mean, connected with the
+Head, was instantly under the dominion of the natural law of
+gravitation, as we call it, and began to sink. Therefore the Lord must
+take other means to save him. He must draw nigh to him in a bodily
+manner. The pride of Peter had withdrawn him from the immediate
+spiritual influence of Christ, conquering his matter; and therefore the
+Lord must come over the stormy space between, come nearer to him in the
+body, and from his own height of safety above the sphere of the natural
+law, stretch out to him the arm of physical aid, lift him up, lead him
+to the boat. The whole salvation of the human race is figured in this
+story. It is all Christ, my love.--Does this help you to believe at
+all?"
+
+"I think it does, papa. But it wants thinking over a good deal. I
+always find as I think, that lighter bits shine out here and there in a
+thing I have no hope of understanding altogether. That always helps me
+to believe that the rest might be understood too, if I were only clever
+enough."
+
+"Simple enough, not clever enough, my dear."
+
+"But there's one thing," said my wife, "that is more interesting to me
+than what you have been talking about. It is the other instances in the
+life of St. Peter in which you said he failed in a similar manner from
+pride or self-satisfaction."
+
+"One, at least, seems to me very clear. You have often remarked to me,
+Ethel, how little praise servants can stand; how almost invariably
+after you have commended the diligence or skill of any of your
+household, as you felt bound to do, one of the first visible results
+was either a falling away in the performance by which she had gained
+the praise, or a more or less violent access, according to the nature
+of the individual, of self-conceit, soon breaking out in bad temper or
+impertinence. Now you will see precisely the same kind of thing in
+Peter."
+
+Here I opened my New Testament, and read fragmentarily, "'But whom say
+ye that I am?... Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God....
+Blessed art thou, Simon.... My Father hath revealed that unto thee. I
+will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.... I must suffer
+many things, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.... Be it
+far from thee, Lord. This shall not be unto thee.... Get thee behind
+me, Satan. Thou art an offence unto me.' Just contemplate the change
+here in the words of our Lord. 'Blessed art thou.' 'Thou art an offence
+unto me.' Think what change has passed on Peter's mood before the
+second of these words could be addressed to him to whom the first had
+just been spoken. The Lord had praised him. Peter grew self-sufficient,
+even to the rebuking of him whose praise had so uplifted him. But it is
+ever so. A man will gain a great moral victory: glad first, then
+uplifted, he will fall before a paltry temptation. I have sometimes
+wondered, too, whether his denial of our Lord had anything to do with
+his satisfaction with himself for making that onslaught upon the high
+priest's servant. It was a brave thing and a faithful to draw a single
+sword against a multitude. In his fiery eagerness and inexperience, the
+blow, well meant to cleave Malchus's head, missed, and only cut off his
+ear; but Peter had herein justified his confident saying that he would
+not deny him. He was not one to deny his Lord who had been the first to
+confess him! Yet ere the cock had crowed, ere the morning had dawned,
+the vulgar grandeur of the palace of the high priest (for let it be art
+itself, it was vulgar grandeur beside that grandeur which it caused
+Peter to deny), and the accusing tone of a maid-servant, were enough to
+make him quail whom the crowd with lanterns, and torches, and weapons,
+had only roused to fight. True, he was excited then, and now he was
+cold in the middle of the night, with Jesus gone from his sight a
+prisoner, and for the faces of friends that had there surrounded him
+and strengthened him with their sympathy, now only the faces of those
+who were, or whom at least Peter thought to be on the other side,
+looking at him curiously, as a strange intruder into their domains.
+Alas, that the courage which led him to follow the Lord should have
+thus led him, not to deny him, but into the denial of him! Yet why
+should I say _alas?_ If the denial of our Lord lay in his heart a
+possible thing, only prevented by his being kept in favourable
+circumstances for confessing him, it was a thousand times better that
+he should deny him, and thus know what a poor weak thing that heart of
+his was, trust it no more, and give it up to the Master to make it
+strong, and pure, and grand. For such an end the Lord was willing to
+bear all the pain of Peter's denial. O, the love of that Son of Man,
+who in the midst of all the wretched weaknesses of those who surrounded
+him, loved the best in them, and looked forward to his own victory for
+them that they might become all that they were meant to be--like him;
+that the lovely glimmerings of truth and love that were in them
+now--the breakings forth of the light that lighteneth every man--might
+grow into the perfect human day; loving them even the more that they
+were so helpless, so oppressed, so far from that ideal which was their
+life, and which all their dim desires were reaching after!"
+
+Here I ceased, and a little overcome with the great picture in my soul
+to which I had been able only to give the poorest expression, rose, and
+retired to my own room. There I could only fall on my knees and pray
+that the Lord Christ, who had died for me, might have his own way with
+me--that it might be worth his while to have done what he did and what
+he was doing now for me. To my Elder Brother, my Lord, and my God, I
+gave myself yet again, confidently, because he cared to have me, and my
+very breath was his. I _would_ be what he wanted, who knew all about
+it, and had done everything that I might be a son of God--a living
+glory of gladness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+NICEBOOTS.
+
+
+The next morning the captain of the lost vessel called upon me early to
+thank me for himself and his men. He was a fine honest-looking burly
+fellow, dressed in blue from head to heel. He might have sat for a
+portrait of Chaucer's shipman, as far as his hue and the first look of
+him went. It was clear that "in many a tempest had his beard be shake,"
+and certainly "the hote somer had made his hew all broun;" but farther
+the likeness would hardly go, for the "good fellow" which Chaucer
+applies with such irony to the shipman of his time, who would filch
+wine, and drown all the captives he made in a sea-fight, was clearly
+applicable in good earnest to this shipman. Still, I thought I had
+something to bring against him, and therefore before we parted I said
+to him--
+
+"They tell me, captain, that your vessel was not seaworthy, and that
+you could not but have known that."
+
+"She was my own craft, sir, and I judged her fit for several voyages
+more. If she had been A 1 she couldn't have been mine; and a man must
+do what he can for his family."
+
+"But you were risking your life, you know."
+
+"A few chances more or less don't much signify to a sailor, sir. There
+ain't nothing to be done without risk. You'll find an old tub go voyage
+after voyage, and she beyond bail, and a clipper fresh off the stocks
+go down in the harbour. It's all in the luck, sir, I assure you."
+
+"Well, if it were your own life I should have nothing to say, seeing
+you have a family to look after; but what about the poor fellows who
+made the voyage with you? Did they know what kind of a vessel they were
+embarking in?"
+
+"Wherever the captain's ready to go he'll always find men ready to
+follow him. Bless you, sir, they never asks no questions. If a sailor
+was always to be thinking of the chances, he'd never set his foot off
+shore."
+
+"Still, I don't think it's right they shouldn't know."
+
+"I daresay they knowed all about the old brig as well as I did myself.
+You gets to know all about a craft just as you do about her captain.
+She's got a character of her own, and she can't hide it long, any more
+than you can hide yours, sir, begging your pardon."
+
+"I daresay that's all correct, but still I shouldn't like anyone to say
+to me, 'You ought to have told me, captain.' Therefore, you see, I'm
+telling you, captain, and now I'm clear.--Have a glass of wine before
+you go," I concluded, ringing the bell.
+
+"Thank you, sir. I'll turn over what you've been saying, and anyhow I
+take it kind of you."
+
+So we parted. I have never seen him since, and shall not, most likely,
+in this world. But he looked like a man that could understand why and
+wherefore I spoke as I did. And I had the advantage of having had a
+chance of doing something for him first of all. Let no man who wants to
+do anything for the soul of a man lose a chance of doing something for
+his body. He ought to be willing, and ready, which is more than
+willing, to do that whether or not; but there are those who need this
+reminder. Of many a soul Jesus laid hold by healing the suffering the
+body brought upon it. No one but himself can tell how much the nucleus
+of the church was composed of and by those who had received health from
+his hands, loving-kindness from the word of his mouth. My own opinion
+is that herein lay the very germ of the kernel of what is now the
+ancient, was then the infant church; that from them, next to the
+disciples themselves, went forth the chief power of life in love, for
+they too had seen the Lord, and in their own humble way could preach
+and teach concerning him. What memories of him theirs must have been!
+
+Things went on very quietly, that is, as I mean now, from the
+view-point of a historian, without much to record bearing notably upon
+after events, for the greater part of the next week. I wandered about
+my parish, making acquaintance with different people in an outside sort
+of way, only now and then finding an opportunity of seeing into their
+souls except by conclusion. But I enjoyed endlessly the aspects of the
+country. It was not picturesque except in parts. There was little wood
+and there were no hills, only undulations, though many of them were
+steep enough even from a pedestrian's point of view. Neither, however,
+were there any plains except high moorland tracts. But the impression
+of the whole country was large, airy, sunshiny, and it was clasped in
+the arms of the infinite, awful, yet how bountiful sea--if one will
+look at the ocean in its world-wide, not to say its eternal aspects,
+and not out of the fears of a hidebound love of life! The sea and the
+sky, I must confess, dwarfed the earth, made it of small account beside
+them; but who could complain of such an influence? At least, not I.
+
+My children bathed in this sea every day, and gathered strength and
+knowledge from it. It was, as I have indicated, a dangerous coast to
+bathe upon. The sweep of the tides varied with the varying sands that
+were cast up. There was now in one place, now in another, a strong
+_undertow_, as they called it--a reflux, that is, of the inflowing
+waters, which was quite sufficient to carry those who could not swim
+out into the great deep, and rendered much exertion necessary, even in
+those who could, to regain the shore. But there was a fine strong
+Cornish woman to take charge of the ladies and the little boys, and
+she, watching the ways of the wild monster, knew the when and the
+where, and all about it.
+
+Connie got out upon the downs every day. She improved in health
+certainly, and we thought a little even in her powers of motion. The
+weather continued superb. What rain there was fell at night, just
+enough for Nature to wash her face with and so look quite fresh in the
+morning. We contrived a dinner on the sands on the other side of the
+bay, for the Friday of this same week.
+
+The morning rose gloriously. Harry and Charlie were turning the house
+upside down, to judge by their noise, long before I was in the humour
+to get up, for I had been reading late the night before. I never made
+much objection to mere noise, knowing that I could stop it the moment I
+pleased, and knowing, which was of more consequence, that so far from
+there being anything wrong in making a noise, the sea would make noise
+enough in our ears before we left Kilkhaven. The moment, however, that
+I heard a thread of whining or a burst of anger in the noise, I would
+interfere at once--treating these just as things that must be dismissed
+at once. Harry and Charlie were, I say, to use their own form of
+speech, making such a row that morning, however, that I was afraid of
+some injury to the house or furniture, which were not our own. So I
+opened my door and called out--
+
+"Harry! Charlie! What on earth are you about?"
+
+"Nothing, papa," answered Charlie. "Only it's so jolly!"
+
+"What is jolly, my boy?" I asked.
+
+"O, I don't know, papa! It's _so_ jolly!"
+
+"Is it the sunshine?" thought I; "and the wind? God's world all over?
+The God of gladness in the hearts of the lads? Is it that? No wonder,
+then, that they cannot tell yet what it is!"
+
+I withdrew into my room; and so far from seeking to put an end to the
+noise--I knew Connie did not mind it--listened to it with a kind of
+reverence, as the outcome of a gladness which the God of joy had
+kindled in their hearts. Soon after, however, I heard certain dim
+growls of expostulation from Harry, and having, from experience, ground
+for believing that the elder was tyrannising over the younger, I
+stopped that and the noise together, sending Charlie to find out where
+the tide would be between one and two o'clock, and Harry to run to the
+top of the hill, and find out the direction of the wind. Before I was
+dressed, Charlie was knocking at my door with the news that it would be
+half-tide about one; and Harry speedily followed with the discovery
+that the wind was north-east by south-west, which of course determined
+that the sun would shine all day.
+
+As the dinner-hour drew near, the servants went over, with Walter at
+their head, to choose a rock convenient for a table, under the shelter
+of the rocks on the sands across the bay. Thither, when Walter
+returned, we bore our Connie, carrying her litter close by the edge of
+the retreating tide, which sometimes broke in a ripple of music under
+her, wetting our feet with innocuous rush. The child's delight was
+extreme, as she thus skimmed the edge of the ocean, with the little
+ones gambolling about her, and her mamma and Wynnie walking quietly on
+the landward side, for she wished to have no one between her and the
+sea.
+
+After scrambling with difficulty over some rocky ledges, and stopping
+at Connie's request, to let her look into a deep pool in the sand,
+which somehow or other retained the water after the rest had retreated,
+we set her down near the mouth of a cave, in the shadow of a rock. And
+there was our dinner nicely laid for us on a flat rock in front of the
+cave. The cliffs rose behind us, with curiously curved and variously
+angled strata. The sun in his full splendour threw dark shadows on the
+brilliant yellow sand, more and more of which appeared as the bright
+blue water withdrew itself, now rippling over it as if it meant to hide
+it all up again, now uncovering more as it withdrew for another rush.
+Before we had finished our dinner, the foremost wavelets appeared so
+far away over the plain of the sand, that it seemed a long walk to the
+edge that had been almost at our feet a little while ago. Between us
+and it lay a lovely desert of glittering sand.
+
+When even Charlie and Harry had arrived at the conclusion that it was
+time to stop eating, we left the shadow and went out into the sun,
+carrying Connie and laying her down in the midst of "the ribbed
+sea-sand," which was very ribby to-day. On a shawl a little way off
+from her lay her baby, crowing and kicking with the same jollity that
+had possessed the boys ever since the morning. I wandered about with
+Wynnie on the sands, picking up amongst other things strange creatures
+in thin shells ending in vegetable-like tufts, if I remember rightly.
+My wife sat on the end of Connie's litter, and Dora and the boys, a
+little way off, were trying how far the full force of three wooden
+spades could, in digging a hole, keep ahead of the water which was ever
+tumbling in the sand from the sides of the same. Behind, the servants
+were busy washing the plates in a pool, and burying the fragments of
+the feast; for I made it a rule wherever we went that the fair face of
+nature was not to be defiled. I have always taken the part of
+excursionists in these latter days of running to and fro, against those
+who complain that the loveliest places are being destroyed by their
+inroads. But there is one most offensive, even disgusting habit amongst
+them--that of leaving bones, fragments of meat pies, and worse than
+all, pieces of greasy paper about the place, which I cannot excuse, or
+at least defend. Even the surface of Cumberland and Westmoreland lakes
+will be defiled with these floating abominations--not abominations at
+all if they are decently burned or buried when done with, but certainly
+abominations when left to be cast hither and thither in the wind, over
+the grass, or on the eddy and ripple of the pure water, for days after
+those who have thus left their shame behind them have returned to their
+shops or factories. I forgive them for trampling down the grass and the
+ferns. That cannot be helped, and in comparison of the good they get,
+is not to be considered at all. But why should they leave such a savage
+trail behind them as this, forgetting too that though they have done
+with the spot, there are others coming after them to whom these
+remnants must be an offence?
+
+At length in our roaming, Wynnie and I approached a long low ridge of
+rock, rising towards the sea into which it ran. Crossing this, we came
+suddenly upon the painter whom Dora had called Niceboots, sitting with
+a small easel before him. We were right above him ere we knew. He had
+his back towards us, so that we saw at once what he was painting.
+
+"O, papa!" cried Wynnie involuntarily, and the painter looked round.
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said. "We came over from the other side, and did
+not see you before. I hope we have not disturbed you much."
+
+"Not in the least," he answered courteously, and rose as he spoke.
+
+I saw that the subject on his easel suggested that of which Wynnie had
+been making a sketch at the same time, on the day when Connie first lay
+on the top of the opposite cliff. But he was not even looking in the
+same direction now.
+
+"Do you mind having your work seen before it is finished?"
+
+"Not in the least, if the spectators will do me the favour to remember
+that most processes have to go through a seemingly chaotic stage," he
+answered.
+
+I was struck with the mode and tone of the remark.
+
+"Here is no common man," I said to myself, and responded to him in
+something of a similar style.
+
+"I wish we could always keep that in mind with regard to human beings
+themselves, as well as their works," I said aloud.
+
+The painter looked at me, and I looked at him.
+
+"We speak each from the experience of his own profession, I presume,"
+he said.
+
+"But," I returned, glancing at the little picture in oils upon his
+easel, "your work here, though my knowledge of painting is next to
+nothing--perhaps I ought to say nothing at all--this picture must have
+long ago passed the chaotic stage."
+
+"It is nearly as much finished as I care to make it," he returned. "I
+hardly count this work at all. I am chiefly amusing, or rather
+pleasing, my own fancy at present."
+
+"Apparently," I remarked, "you had the conical rock outside the hay for
+your model, and now you are finishing it with your back turned towards
+it. How is that?"
+
+"I will soon explain," he answered. "The moment I saw this rock, it
+reminded me of Dante's Purgatory."
+
+"Ah, you are a reader of Dante?" I said. "In the original, I hope."
+
+"Yes. A friend of mine, a brother painter, an Italian, set me going
+with that, and once going with Dante, nobody could well stop. I never
+knew what intensity _per se_ was till I began to read Dante."
+
+"That is quite my own feeling. Now, to return to your picture."
+
+"Without departing at all from natural forms, I thought to make it
+suggest the Purgatorio to anyone who remembered the description given
+of the place _ab extra_ by Ulysses, in the end of the twenty-sixth
+canto of the Inferno. Of course, that thing there is a mere rock, yet
+it has certain mountain forms about it. I have put it at a much greater
+distance, you see, and have sought to make it look a solitary mountain
+in the midst of a great water. You will discover even now that the
+circles of the Purgatory are suggested without any approach, I think,
+to artificial structure; and there are occasional hints at figures,
+which you cannot definitely detach from the rocks--which, by the way,
+you must remember, were in one part full of sculptures. I have kept the
+mountain near enough, however, to indicate the great expanse of wild
+flowers on the top, which Matilda was so busy gathering. I want to
+indicate too the wind up there in the terrestrial paradise, ever and
+always blowing one way. You remember, Mr. Walton?"--for the young man,
+getting animated, began to talk as if we had known each other for some
+time--and here he repeated the purport of Dante's words in English:
+
+  "An air of sweetness, changeless in its flow,
+  With no more strength than in a soft wind lies,
+  Smote peacefully against me on the brow.
+  By which the leaves all trembling, level-wise,
+  Did every one bend thitherward to where
+  The high mount throws its shadow at sunrise."
+
+"I thought you said you did not use translations?"
+
+"I thought it possible that--Miss Walton (?)" interrogatively
+this--"might not follow the Italian so easily, and I feared to seem
+pedantic."
+
+"She won't lag far behind, I flatter myself," I returned. "Whose
+translation do you quote?"
+
+He hesitated a moment; then said carelessly:
+
+"I have cobbled a few passages after that fashion myself."
+
+"It has the merit of being near the original at least," I returned;
+"and that seems to me one of the chief merits a translation can
+possess."
+
+"Then," the painter resumed, rather hastily, as if to avoid any further
+remark upon his verses, "you see those white things in the air above?"
+Here he turned to Wynnie. "Miss Walton will remember--I think she was
+making a drawing of the rock at the same time I was--how the seagulls,
+or some such birds--only two or three of them--kept flitting about the
+top of it?"
+
+"I remember quite well," answered Wynnie, with a look of appeal to me.
+
+"Yes," I interposed; "my daughter, in describing what she had been
+attempting to draw, spoke especially of the birds over the rock. For
+she said the white lapping of the waves looked like spirits trying to
+get loose, and the white birds like foam that had broken its chains,
+and risen in triumph into the air."
+
+Here Mr. Niceboots, for as yet I did not know what else to call him,
+looked at Wynnie almost with a start.
+
+"How wonderfully that falls in with my fancy about the rock!" he said.
+"Purgatory indeed! with imprisoned souls lapping at its foot, and the
+free souls winging their way aloft in ether. Well, this world is a kind
+of purgatory anyhow--is it not, Mr. Walton?"
+
+"Certainly it is. We are here tried as by fire, to see what our work
+is--whether wood, hay, and stubble, or gold and silver and precious
+stones."
+
+"You see," resumed the painter, "if anybody only glanced at my little
+picture, he would take those for sea-birds; but if he looked into it,
+and began to suspect me, he would find out that they were Dante and
+Beatrice on their way to the sphere of the moon."
+
+"In one respect at least, then, your picture has the merit of
+corresponding to fact; for what thing is there in the world, or what
+group of things, in which the natural man will not see merely the
+things of nature, but the spiritual man the things of the spirit?"
+
+"I am no theologian," said the painter, turning away, I thought
+somewhat coldly.
+
+But I could see that Wynnie was greatly interested in him. Perhaps she
+thought that here was some enlightenment of the riddle of the world for
+her, if she could but get at what he was thinking. She was used to my
+way of it: here might be something new.
+
+"If I can be of any service to Miss Walton with her drawing, I shall be
+happy," he said, turning again towards me.
+
+But his last gesture had made me a little distrustful of him, and I
+received his advances on this point with a coldness which I did not
+wish to make more marked than his own towards my last observation.
+
+"You are very kind," I said; "but Miss Walton does not presume to be an
+artist."
+
+I saw a slight shade pass over Wynnie's countenance. When I turned to
+Mr. Niceboots, a shade of a different sort was on his. Surely I had
+said something wrong to cast a gloom on two young faces. I made haste
+to make amends.
+
+"We are just going to have some coffee," I said, "for my servants, I
+see, have managed to kindle a fire. Will you come and allow me to
+introduce you to Mrs. Walton?"
+
+"With much pleasure," he answered, rising from the rock whereon, as he
+spoke about his picture, he had again seated himself. He was a
+fine-built, black-bearded, sunburnt fellow, with clear gray eyes
+notwithstanding, a rather Roman nose, and good features generally. But
+there was an air of suppression, if not of sadness, about him, however,
+did not in the least interfere with the manliness of his countenance,
+or of its expression.
+
+"But," I said, "how am I to effect an introduction, seeing I do not yet
+know your name."
+
+I had had to keep a sharp look-out on myself lest I should call him Mr.
+Niceboots. He smiled very graciously and replied,
+
+"My name is Percivale--Charles Percivale."
+
+"A descendant of Sir Percivale of King Arthur's Round Table?"
+
+"I cannot count quite so far back," he answered, "as that--not quite to
+the Conquest," he added, with a slight deepening of his sunburnt hue.
+"I do come of a fighting race, but I cannot claim Sir Percivale."
+
+We were now walking along the edge of the still retreating waves
+towards the group upon the sands, Mr. Percivale and I foremost, and
+Wynnie lingering behind.
+
+"O, do look here papa!" she cried, from some little distance.
+
+We turned and saw her gazing at something on the sand at her feet.
+Hastening back, we found it to be a little narrow line of foam-bubbles,
+which the water had left behind it on the sand, slowly breaking and
+passing out of sight. Why there should be foam-bubbles there then, and
+not always, I do not know. But there they were--and such colours! deep
+rose and grassy green and ultramarine blue; and, above all, one dark,
+yet brilliant and intensely-burnished, metallic gold. All of them were
+of a solid-looking burnished colour, like opaque body-colour laid on
+behind translucent crystal. Those little ocean bubbles were well worth
+turning to see; and so I said to Wynnie. But, as we gazed, they went on
+vanishing, one by one. Every moment a heavenly glory of hue burst, and
+was nowhere.
+
+We walked away again towards the rest of our party.
+
+"Don't you think those bubbles more beautiful than any precious stones
+you ever saw, papa?"
+
+"Yes, my love, I think they are, except it be the opal. In the opal,
+God seems to have fixed the evanescent and made the vanishing eternal."
+
+"And flowers are more beautiful things than jewels?' she said
+interrogatively.
+
+"Many--perhaps most flowers are," I granted. "And did you ever see such
+curves and delicate textures anywhere else as in the clouds, papa?"
+
+"I think not--in the cirrhous clouds at least--the frozen ones. But
+what are you putting me to my catechism for in this way, my child?"
+
+"O, papa, I could go on a long time with that catechism; but I will end
+with one question more, which you will perhaps find a little harder to
+answer. Only I daresay you have had an answer ready for years lest one
+of us should ask you some day."
+
+"No, my love. I never got an answer ready for anything lest one of my
+children should ask me. But it is not surprising either that children
+should be puzzled about the things that have puzzled their father, or
+that by the time they are able to put the questions, he should have
+found out some sort of an answer to most of them. Go on with your
+catechism, Wynnie. Now for your puzzle!"
+
+"It's not a funny question, papa; it's a very serious one. I can't
+think why the unchanging God should have made all the most beautiful
+things wither and grow ugly, or burst and vanish, or die somehow and be
+no more. Mamma is not so beautiful as she once was, is she?"
+
+"In one way, no; but in another and better way, much more so. But we
+will not talk about her kind of beauty just now; we will keep to the
+more material loveliness of which you have been speaking--though, in
+truth, no loveliness can be only material. Well, then, for my answer;
+it is, I think, because God loves the beauty so much that he makes all
+beautiful things vanish quickly."
+
+"I do not understand you, papa."
+
+"I daresay not, my dear. But I will explain to you a little, if Mr.
+Percivale will excuse me."
+
+"On the contrary, I am greatly interested, both in the question and the
+answer."
+
+"Well, then, Wynnie; everything has a soul and a body, or something
+like them. By the body we know the soul. But we are always ready to
+love the body instead of the soul. Therefore, God makes the body die
+continually, that we may learn to love the soul indeed. The world is
+full of beautiful things, but God has saved many men from loving the
+mere bodies of them, by making them poor; and more still by reminding
+them that if they be as rich as Croesus all their lives, they will be
+as poor as Diogenes--poorer, without even a tub--when this world, with
+all its pictures, scenery, books, and--alas for some
+Christians!--bibles even, shall have vanished away."
+
+"Why do you say _alas_, papa--if they are Christians especially?"
+
+"I say _alas_ only from their point of view, not from mine. I mean such
+as are always talking and arguing from the Bible, and never giving
+themselves any trouble to do what it tells them. They insist on the
+anise and cummin, and forget the judgment, mercy, and faith. These
+worship the body of the truth, and forget the soul of it. If the
+flowers were not perishable, we should cease to contemplate their
+beauty, either blinded by the passion for hoarding the bodies of them,
+or dulled by the hebetude of commonplaceness that the constant presence
+of them would occasion. To compare great things with small, the flowers
+wither, the bubbles break, the clouds and sunsets pass, for the very
+same holy reason, in the degree of its application to them, for which
+the Lord withdrew from his disciples and ascended again to his
+Father--that the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Soul of things,
+might come to them and abide with them, and so the Son return, and the
+Father be revealed. The flower is not its loveliness, and its
+loveliness we must love, else we shall only treat them as flower-greedy
+children, who gather and gather, and fill hands and baskets, from a
+mere desire of acquisition, excusable enough in them, but the same in
+kind, however harmless in mode, and degree, and object, as the avarice
+of the miser. Therefore God, that we may always have them, and ever
+learn to love their beauty, and yet more their truth, sends the
+beneficent winter that we may think about what we have lost, and
+welcome them when they come again with greater tenderness and love,
+with clearer eyes to see, and purer hearts to understand, the spirit
+that dwells in them. We cannot do without the 'winter of our
+discontent.' Shakspere surely saw that when he makes Titania say, in _A
+Midsummer Night's Dream_:
+
+  'The human mortals want their winter here'--
+
+namely, to set things right; and none of those editors who would alter
+the line seem to have been capable of understanding its import."
+
+"I think I understand you a little," answered Wynnie. Then, changing
+her tone, "I told you, papa, you would have an answer ready; didn't I?"
+
+"Yes, my child; but with this difference--I found the answer to meet my
+own necessities, not yours."
+
+"And so you had it ready for me when I wanted it."
+
+"Just so. That is the only certainty you have in regard to what you
+give away. No one who has not tasted it and found it good has a right
+to offer any spiritual dish to his neighbour."
+
+Mr. Percivale took no part in our conversation. The moment I had
+presented him to Mrs. Walton and Connie, and he had paid his respects
+by a somewhat stately old-world obeisance, he merged the salutation
+into a farewell, and, either forgetting my offer of coffee, or having
+changed his mind, withdrew, a little to my disappointment, for,
+notwithstanding his lack of response where some things he said would
+have led me to expect it, I had begun to feel much interested in him.
+
+He was scarcely beyond hearing, when Dora came up to me from her
+digging, with an eager look on her sunny face.
+
+"Hasn't he got nice boots, papa?"
+
+"Indeed, my dear, I am unable to support you in that assertion, for I
+never saw his boots."
+
+"I did, then," returned the child; "and I never saw such nice boots."
+
+"I accept the statement willingly," I replied; and we heard no more of
+the boots, for his name was now substituted for his nickname. Nor did I
+see himself again for some days--not in fact till next Sunday--though
+why he should come to church at all was something of a puzzle to me,
+especially when I knew him better.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE BLACKSMITH.
+
+
+The next day I set out after breakfast to inquire about a blacksmith.
+It was not every or any blacksmith that would do. I must not fix on the
+first to do my work because he was the first. There was one in the
+village, I soon learned; but I found him an ordinary man, who, I have
+no doubt, could shoe a horse and avoid the quick, but from whom any
+greater delicacy of touch was not to be expected. Inquiring further, I
+heard of a young smith who had lately settled in a hamlet a couple of
+miles distant, but still within the parish. In the afternoon I set out
+to find him. To my surprise, he was a pale-faced, thoughtful-looking
+man, with a huge frame, which appeared worn rather than naturally thin,
+and large eyes that looked at the anvil as if it was the horizon of the
+world. He had got a horse-shoe in his tongs when I entered.
+Notwithstanding the fire that glowed on the hearth, and the sparks that
+flew like a nimbus in eruption from about his person, the place looked
+very dark to me entering from the glorious blaze of the almost noontide
+sun, and felt cool after the deep lane through which I had come, and
+which had seemed a very reservoir of sunbeams. I could see the smith by
+the glow of his horse-shoe; but all between me and the shoe was dark.
+
+"Good-morning," I said. "It is a good thing to find a man by his work.
+I heard you half a mile off or so, and now I see you, but only by the
+glow of your work. It is a grand thing to work in fire."
+
+He lifted his hammered hand to his forehead courteously, and as lightly
+as if the hammer had been the butt-end of a whip.
+
+"I don't know if you would say the same if you had to work at it in
+weather like this," he answered.
+
+"If I did not," I returned, "that would be the fault of my weakness,
+and would not affect the assertion I have just made, that it is a fine
+thing to work in fire."
+
+"Well, you may be right," he rejoined with a sigh, as, throwing the
+horse-shoe he had been fashioning from the tongs on the ground, he next
+let the hammer drop beside the anvil, and leaning against it held his
+head for a moment between his hands, and regarded the floor. "It does
+not much matter to me," he went on, "if I only get through my work and
+have done with it. No man shall say I shirked what I'd got to do. And
+then when it's over there won't be a word to say agen me, or--"
+
+He did not finish the sentence. And now I could see the sunlight lying
+in a somewhat dreary patch, if the word _dreary_ can be truly used with
+respect to any manifestation of sunlight, on the dark clay floor.
+
+"I hope you are not ill," I said.
+
+He made no answer, but taking up his tongs caught with it from a beam
+one of a number of roughly-finished horse-shoes which hung there, and
+put it on the fire to be fashioned to a certain fit. While he turned it
+in the fire, and blew the bellows, I stood regarding him. "This man
+will do for my work," I said to myself; "though I should not wonder
+from the look of him if it was the last piece of work he ever did under
+the New Jerusalem." The smith's words broke in on my meditations.
+
+"When I was a little boy," he said, "I once wanted to stay at home from
+school. I had, I believe, a little headache, but nothing worth minding.
+I told my mother that I had a headache, and she kept me, and I helped
+her at her spinning, which was what I liked best of anything. But in
+the afternoon the Methodist preacher came in to see my mother, and he
+asked me what was the matter with me, and my mother answered for me
+that I had a bad head, and he looked at me; and as my head was quite
+well by this time, I could not help feeling guilty. And he saw my look,
+I suppose, sir, for I can't account for what he said any other way; and
+he turned to me, and he said to me, solemn-like, 'Is your head bad
+enough to send you to the Lord Jesus to make you whole?' I could not
+speak a word, partly from bashfulness, I suppose, for I was but ten
+years old. So he followed it up, as they say: 'Then you ought to be at
+school,' says he. I said nothing, because I couldn't. But never since
+then have I given in as long as I could stand. And I can stand now, and
+lift my hammer, too," he said, as he took the horse-shoe from the
+forge, laid it on the anvil, and again made a nimbus of coruscating
+iron.
+
+"You are just the man I want," I said. "I've got a job for you, down to
+Kilkhaven, as you say in these parts."
+
+"What is it, sir? Something about the church? I should ha' thought the
+church was all spick and span by this time."
+
+"I see you know who I am," I said.
+
+"Of course I do," he answered. "I don't go to church myself, being
+brought up a Methodist; but anything that happens in the parish is
+known the next day all over it."
+
+"You won't mind doing my job though you are a Methodist, will you?" I
+asked.
+
+"Not I, sir. If I've read right, it's the fault of the Church that we
+don't pull all alongside. You turned us out, sir; we didn't go out of
+ourselves. At least, if all they say is true, which I can't be sure of,
+you know, in this world."
+
+"You are quite right there though," I answered. "And in doing so, the
+Church had the worst of it--as all that judge and punish their
+neighbours have. But you have been the worse for it, too: all of which
+is to be laid to the charge of the Church. For there is not one
+clergyman I know--mind, I say, that I know--who would have made such a
+cruel speech to a boy as that the Methodist parson made to you."
+
+"But it did me good, sir?"
+
+"Are you sure of that? I am not. Are you sure, first of all, it did not
+make you proud? Are you sure it has not made you work beyond your
+strength--I don't mean your strength of arm, for clearly that is all
+that could be wished, but of your chest, your lungs? Is there not some
+danger of your leaving someone who is dependent on you too soon
+unprovided for? Is there not some danger of your having worked as if
+God were a hard master?--of your having worked fiercely, indignantly,
+as if he wronged you by not caring for you, not understanding you?"
+
+He returned me no answer, but hammered momently on his anvil. Whether
+he felt what I meant, or was offended at my remark, I could not then
+tell. I thought it best to conclude the interview with business.
+
+"I have a delicate little job that wants nice handling, and I fancy you
+are just the man to do it to my mind," I said.
+
+"What is it, sir?" he asked, in a friendly manner enough.
+
+"If you will excuse me, I would rather show it to you than talk about
+it," I returned.
+
+"As you please, sir. When do you want me?"
+
+"The first hour you can come."
+
+"To-morrow morning?"
+
+"If you feel inclined."
+
+"For that matter, I'd rather go to bed."
+
+"Come to me instead: it's light work."
+
+"I will, sir--at ten o'clock."
+
+"If you please."
+
+And so it was arranged.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE LIFE-BOAT.
+
+
+The next day rose glorious. Indeed, early as the sun rose, I saw him
+rise--saw him, from the down above the house, over the land to the east
+and north, ascend triumphant into his own light, which had prepared the
+way for him; while the clouds that hung over the sea glowed out with a
+faint flush, as anticipating the hour when the west should clasp the
+declining glory in a richer though less dazzling splendour, and shine
+out the bride of the bridegroom east, which behold each other from afar
+across the intervening world, and never mingle but in the sight of the
+eyes. The clear pure light of the morning made me long for the truth in
+my heart, which alone could make me pure and clear as the morning, tune
+me up to the concert-pitch of the nature around me. And the wind that
+blew from the sunrise made me hope in the God who had first breathed
+into my nostrils the breath of life, that he would at length so fill me
+with his breath, his wind, his spirit, that I should think only his
+thoughts and live his life, finding therein my own life, only glorified
+infinitely.
+
+After breakfast and prayers, I would go to the church to await the
+arrival of my new acquaintance the smith. In order to obtain entrance,
+I had, however, to go to the cottage of the sexton. This was not my
+first visit there, so that I may now venture to take my reader with me.
+To reach the door, I had to cross a hollow by a bridge, built, for the
+sake of the road, over what had once been the course of a rivulet from
+the heights above. Now it was a kind of little glen, or what would in
+Scotland be called a den, I think, grown with grass and wild flowers
+and ferns, some of them, rare and fine. The roof of the cottage came
+down to the road, and, until you came quite near, you could not but
+wonder where the body that supported this head could be. But you soon
+saw that the ground fell suddenly away, leaving a bank against which
+the cottage was built. Crossing a garden of the smallest, the principal
+flowers of which were the stonecrop on its walls, by a flag-paved path,
+you entered the building, and, to your surprise, found yourself, not in
+a little cottage kitchen, as you expected, but in a waste-looking
+space, that seemed to have forgotten the use for which it had been
+built. There was a sort of loft along one side of it, and it was heaped
+with indescribable lumber-looking stuff with here and there a hint at
+possible machinery. The place had been a mill for grinding corn, and
+its wheel had been driven by the stream which had run for ages in the
+hollow of which I have already spoken. But when the canal came to be
+constructed, the stream had to be turned aside from its former course,
+and indeed was now employed upon occasion to feed the canal; so that
+the mill of necessity had fallen into disuse and decay. Crossing this
+floor, you entered another door, and turning sharp to the left, went
+down a few steps of a ladder-sort of stair, and after knocking your hat
+against a beam, emerged in the comfortable quaint little cottage
+kitchen you had expected earlier. A cheerful though small fire burns in
+the grate--for even here the hearth-fire has vanished from the records
+of cottage-life--and is pleasant here even in the height of summer,
+though it is counted needful only for cooking purposes. The ceiling,
+which consists only of the joists and the boards that floor the bedroom
+above, is so low, that necessity, if not politeness, would compel you
+to take off your already-bruised hat. Some of these joists, you will
+find, are made further useful by supporting each a shelf, before which
+hangs a little curtain of printed cotton, concealing the few stores and
+postponed eatables of the house--forming, in fact, both store-room and
+larder of the family. On the walls hang several coloured prints, and
+within a deep glazed frame the figure of a ship in full dress, carved
+in rather high relief in sycamore.
+
+As I now entered, Mrs. Coombes rose from a high-backed settle near the
+fire, and bade me good-morning with a courtesy.
+
+"What a lovely day it is, Mrs. Coombes! It is so bright over the sea,"
+I said, going to the one little window which looked out on the great
+Atlantic, "that one almost expects a great merchant navy to come
+sailing into Kilkhaven--sunk to the water's edge with silks, and ivory,
+and spices, and apes, and peacocks, like the ships of Solomon that we
+read about--just as the sun gets up to the noonstead."
+
+Before I record her answer, I turn to my reader, who in the spirit
+accompanies me, and have a little talk with him. I always make it a
+rule to speak freely with the less as with the more educated of my
+friends. I never _talk down_ to them, except I be expressly explaining
+something to them. The law of the world is as the law of the family.
+Those children grow much the faster who hear all that is going on in
+the house. Reaching ever above themselves, they arrive at an
+understanding at fifteen, which, in the usual way of things, they would
+not reach before five-and-twenty or thirty; and this in a natural way,
+and without any necessary priggishness, except such as may belong to
+their parents. Therefore I always spoke to the poor and uneducated as
+to my own people,--freely, not much caring whether I should be quite
+understood or not; for I believed in influences not to be measured by
+the measure of the understanding.
+
+But what was the old woman's answer? It was this:
+
+"I know, sir. And when I was as young as you"--I was not so very young,
+my reader may well think--"I thought like that about the sea myself.
+Everything come from the sea. For my boy Willie he du bring me home the
+beautifullest parrot and the talkingest you ever see, and the red shawl
+all worked over with flowers: I'll show it to you some day, sir, when
+you have time. He made that ship you see in the frame there, sir, all
+with his own knife, out on a bit o' wood that he got at the Marishes,
+as they calls it, sir--a bit of an island somewheres in the great sea.
+But the parrot's gone dead like the rest of them, sir.--Where am I? and
+what am I talking about?" she added, looking down at her knitting as if
+she had dropped a stitch, or rather as if she had forgotten what she
+was making, and therefore what was to come next.
+
+"You were telling me how you used to think of the sea--"
+
+"When I was as young as you. I remember, sir. Well, that lasted a long
+time--lasted till my third boy fell asleep in the wide water; for it du
+call it falling asleep, don't it, sir?"
+
+"The Bible certainly does," I answered.
+
+"It's the Bible I be meaning, of course," she returned. "Well, after
+that, but I don't know what began it, only I did begin to think about
+the sea as something that took away things and didn't bring them no
+more. And somehow or other she never look so blue after that, and she
+give me the shivers. But now, sir, she always looks to me like one o'
+the shining ones that come to fetch the pilgrims. You've heard tell of
+the _Pilgrim's Progress_, I daresay, sir, among the poor people; for
+they du say it was written by a tinker, though there be a power o' good
+things in it that I think the gentlefolk would like if they knowed it."
+
+"I do know the book--nearly as well as I know the Bible," I answered;
+"and the shining ones are very beautiful in it. I am glad you can think
+of the sea that way."
+
+"It's looking in at the window all day as I go about the house," she
+answered, "and all night too when I'm asleep; and if I hadn't learned
+to think of it that way, it would have driven me mad, I du believe. I
+was forced to think that way about it, or not think at all. And that
+wouldn't be easy, with the sound of it in your ears the last thing at
+night and the first thing in the morning."
+
+"The truth of things is indeed the only refuge from the look of
+things," I replied. "But now I want the key of the church, if you will
+trust me with it, for I have something to do there this morning; and
+the key of the tower as well, if you please."
+
+With her old smile, ripened only by age, she reached the ponderous keys
+from the nail where they hung, and gave them into my hand. I left her
+in the shadow of her dwelling, and stepped forth into the sunlight. The
+first thing I observed was the blacksmith waiting for me at the church
+door.
+
+Now that I saw him in the full light of day, and now that he wore his
+morning face upon which the blackness of labour had not yet gathered, I
+could see more plainly how far he was from well. There was a flush on
+his thin cheek by which the less used exercise of walking revealed his
+inward weakness, and the light in his eyes had something of the
+far-country in them--"the light that never was on sea or shore." But
+his speech was cheerful, for he had been walking in the light of this
+world, and that had done something to make the light within him shine a
+little more freely.
+
+"How do you find yourself to-day?" I asked.
+
+"Quite well, sir, I thank you," he answered. "A day like this does a
+man good. But," he added, and his countenance fell, "the heart knoweth
+its own bitterness."
+
+"It may know it too much," I returned, "just because it refuses to let
+a stranger intermeddle therewith."
+
+He made no reply. I turned the key in the great lock, and the
+iron-studded oak opened and let us into the solemn gloom.
+
+It did not require many minutes to make the man understand what I
+wanted of him.
+
+"We must begin at the bells and work down," he said.
+
+So we went up into the tower, where, with the help of a candle I
+fetched for him from the cottage, he made a good many minute
+measurements; found that carpenter's work was necessary for the
+adjustment of the hammers and cranks and the leading of the rods,
+undertook the management of the whole, and in the course of an hour and
+a half went home to do what had to be done before any fixing could be
+commenced, assuring me that he had no doubt of bringing the job to a
+satisfactory conclusion, although the force of the blow on the bell
+would doubtless have to be regulated afterwards by repeated trials.
+
+"In a fortnight, I hope you will be able to play a tune to the parish,
+sir," he added, as he took his leave.
+
+I resolved, if possible, to know more of the man, and find out his
+trouble, if haply I might be able to give him any comfort, for I was
+all but certain that there was a deeper cause for his gloom than the
+state of his health.
+
+When he was gone I stood with the key of the church in my hand, and
+looked about me. Nature at least was in glorious health--sunshine in
+her eyes, light fantastic cloud-images passing through her brain, her
+breath coming and going in soft breezes perfumed with the scents of
+meadows and wild flowers, and her green robe shining in the motions of
+her gladness. I turned to lock the church door, though in my heart I
+greatly disapproved of locking the doors of churches, and only did so
+now because it was not my church, and I had no business to force my
+opinions upon other customs. But when I turned I received a kind of
+questioning shock. There was the fallen world, as men call it, shining
+in glory and gladness, because God was there; here was the way into the
+lost Paradise, yea, the door into an infinitely higher Eden than that
+ever had or ever could have been, iron-clamped and riveted, gloomy and
+low-browed like the entrance to a sepulchre, and surrounded with the
+grim heads of grotesque monsters of the deep. What did it mean? Here
+was contrast enough to require harmonising, or if that might not be,
+then accounting for. Perhaps it was enough to say that although God
+made both the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace, yet the
+symbol of the latter was the work of man, and might not altogether
+correspond to God's idea of the matter. I turned away thoughtful, and
+went through the churchyard with my eye on the graves.
+
+As I left the churchyard, still looking to the earth, the sound of
+voices reached my ear. I looked up. There, down below me, at the foot
+of the high bank on which I stood, lay a gorgeous shining thing upon
+the bosom of the canal, full of men, and surrounded by men, women, and
+children, delighting in its beauty. I had never seen such a thing
+before, but I knew at once, as by instinct, which of course it could
+not have been, that it was the life-boat. But in its gorgeous colours,
+red and white and green, it looked more like the galley that bore
+Cleopatra to Actium. Nor, floating so light on the top of the water,
+and broad in the beam withal, curved upward and ornamented at stern and
+stem, did it look at all like a creature formed to battle with the
+fierce elements. A pleasure-boat for floating between river banks it
+seemed, drawn by swans mayhap, and regarded in its course by fair eyes
+from green terrace-walks, or oriel windows of ancient houses on verdant
+lawns. Ten men sat on the thwarts, and one in the stern by the yet
+useless rudder, while men and boys drew the showy thing by a rope
+downward to the lock-gates. The men in the boat, wore blue jerseys, but
+you could see little of the colour for strange unshapely things that
+they wore above them, like an armour cut out of a row of organ pipes.
+They were their cork-jackets; for every man had to be made into a
+life-boat himself. I descended the bank, and stood on the edge of the
+canal as it drew near. Then I saw that every oar was loosely but firmly
+fastened to the rowlock, so that it could be dropped and caught again
+in a moment; and that the gay sides of the unwieldy-looking creature
+were festooned with ropes from the gunwale, for the men to lay hold of
+when she capsized, for the earlier custom of fastening the men to their
+seats had been quite given up, because their weight under the water
+might prevent the boat from righting itself again, and the men could
+not come to the surface. Now they had a better chance in their freedom,
+though why they should not be loosely attached to the boat, I do not
+quite see.
+
+They towed the shining thing through the upper gate of the lock, and
+slowly she sank from my sight, and for some moments was no more to be
+seen, for I had remained standing where first she passed me. All at
+once there she was beyond the covert of the lock-head, abroad and free,
+fleeting from the strokes of ten swift oars over the still waters of
+the bay towards the waves that roared further out where the
+ground-swell was broken by the rise of the sandy coast. There was no
+vessel in danger now, as the talk of the spectators informed me; it was
+only for exercise and show that they went out. It seemed all child's
+play for a time; but when they got among the broken waves, then it
+looked quite another thing. The motion of the waters laid hold upon
+her, and soon tossed her fearfully, now revealing the whole of her
+capacity on the near side of one of their slopes, now hiding her whole
+bulk in one of their hollows beyond. She, careless as a child in the
+troubles of the world, floated about amongst them with what appeared
+too much buoyancy for the promise of a safe return. Again and again she
+was driven from her course towards the low rocks on the other side of
+the bay, and again and again, returned to disport herself, like a
+sea-animal, as it seemed, upon the backs of the wild, rolling, and
+bursting billows.
+
+"Can she go no further?" I asked of the captain of the coastguard, whom
+I found standing by my side.
+
+"Not without some danger," he answered.
+
+"What, then, must it be in a storm!" I remarked.
+
+"Then of course," he returned, "they must take their chance. But there
+is no good in running risks for nothing. That swell is quite enough for
+exercise."
+
+"But is it enough to accustom them to face the danger that will come?"
+I asked.
+
+"With danger comes courage," said the old sailor.
+
+"Were you ever afraid?"
+
+"No, sir. I don't think I ever was afraid. Yes, I believe I was once
+for one moment, no more, when I fell from the maintop-gallant yard, and
+felt myself falling. But it was soon over, for I only fell into the
+maintop. I was expecting the smash on deck when I was brought up there.
+But," he resumed, "I don't care much about the life-boat. My rockets
+are worth a good deal more, as you may see, sir, before the winter is
+over; for seldom does a winter pass without at least two or three
+wrecks close by here on this coast. The full force of the Atlantic
+breaks here, sir. I _have_ seen a life-boat--not that one--_she's_ done
+nothing yet--pitched stern over stem; not capsized, you know, sir, in
+the ordinary way, but struck by a wave behind while she was just
+hanging in the balance on the knife-edge of a wave, and flung a
+somerset, as I say, stern over stem, and four of her men lost."
+
+While we spoke I saw on the pier-head the tall figure of the painter
+looking earnestly at the boat. I thought he was regarding it chiefly
+from an artistic point of view, but I became aware before long that
+that would not have been consistent with the character of Charles
+Percivale. He had been, I learned afterwards, a crack oarsman at
+Oxford, and had belonged to the University boat, so that he had some
+almost class-sympathy with the doings of the crew.
+
+In a little while the boat sped swiftly back, entered the lock, was
+lifted above the level of the storm-heaved ocean, and floated up the
+smooth canal calmly as if she had never known what trouble was. Away up
+to the pretty little Tudor-fashioned house in which she lay--one could
+almost fancy dreaming of storms to come--she went, as softly as if
+moved only by her "own sweet will," in the calm consolation for her
+imprisonment of having tried her strength, and found therein good hope
+of success for the time when she should rush to the rescue of men from
+that to which, as a monster that begets monsters, she a watching
+Perseis, lay ready to offer battle. The poor little boat lying in her
+little house watching the ocean, was something signified in my eyes,
+and not less so after what came in the course of changing seasons and
+gathered storms.
+
+All this time I had the keys in my hand, and now went back to the
+cottage to restore them to their place upon the wall. When I entered
+there was a young woman of a sweet interesting countenance talking to
+Mrs. Coombes. Now as it happened, I had never yet seen the daughter who
+lived with her, and thought this was she.
+
+"I've found your daughter at last then?" I said, approaching them.
+
+"Not yet, sir. She goes out to work, and her hands be pretty full at
+present. But this be almost my daughter, sir," she added. "This is my
+next daughter, Mary Trehern, from the south. She's got a place near by,
+to be near her mother that is to be, that's me."
+
+Mary was hanging her head and blushing, as the old woman spoke.
+
+"I understand," I said. "And when are you going to get your new mother,
+Mary? Soon I hope."
+
+But she gave me no reply--only hung her head lower and blushed deeper.
+
+Mrs. Coombes spoke for her.
+
+"She's shy, you see, sir. But if she was to speak her mind, she would
+ask you whether you wouldn't marry her and Willie when he comes home
+from his next voyage."
+
+Mary's hands were trembling now, and she turned half away.
+
+"With all my heart," I said.
+
+The girl tried to turn towards me, but could not. I looked at her face
+a little more closely. Through all its tremor, there was a look of
+constancy that greatly pleased me. I tried to make her speak.
+
+"When do you expect Willie home?" I said.
+
+She made a little gasp and murmur, but no articulate words came.
+
+"Don't be frightened, Mary," said her mother, as I found she always
+called her. "The gentleman won't be sharp with you."
+
+She lifted a pair of soft brown eyes with one glance and a smile, and
+then sank them again.
+
+"He'll be home in about a month, we think," answered the mother. "She's
+a good ship he's aboard of, and makes good voyages."
+
+"It is time to think about the bans, then," I said.
+
+"If you please, sir," said the mother.
+
+"Just come to me about it, and I will attend to it--when you think
+proper."
+
+I thought I could hear a murmured "Thank you, sir," from the girl, but
+I could not be certain that she spoke. I shook hands with them, and
+went for a stroll on the other side of the bay.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+MR. PERCIVALE.
+
+
+When I reached home I found that Connie was already on her watch-tower.
+For while I was away, they had carried her out that she might see the
+life-boat. I followed her, and found the whole family about her couch,
+and with them Mr. Percivale, who was showing her some sketches that he
+had made in the neighbourhood. Connie knew nothing of drawing; but she
+seemed to me always to catch the feeling of a thing. Her remarks
+therefore were generally worth listening to, and Mr. Percivale was
+evidently interested in them. Wynnie stood behind Connie, looking over
+her shoulder at the drawing in her hand.
+
+"How do you get that shade of green?" I heard her ask as I came up.
+
+And then Mr. Percivale proceeded to tell her; from which beginning they
+went on to other things, till Mr. Percivale said--
+
+"But it is hardly fair, Miss Walton; to criticise my work while you
+keep your own under cover."
+
+"I wasn't criticising, Mr. Percivale; was I, Connie?"
+
+"I didn't hear her make a single remark, Mr. Percivale," said Connie,
+taking her sister's side.
+
+To my surprise they were talking away with the young man as if they had
+known him for years, and my wife was seated at the foot of the couch,
+apparently taking no exception to the suddenness of the intimacy. I am
+afraid, when I think of it, that a good many springs would be missing
+from the world's history if they might not flow till the papas gave
+their wise consideration to everything about the course they were to
+take.
+
+"I think, though," added Connie, "it is only fair that Mr. Percivale
+_should_ see your work, Wynnie."
+
+"Then I will fetch my portfolio, if Mr. Percivale will promise to
+remember that I have no opinion of it. At the same time, if I could do
+what I wanted to do, I think I should not be ashamed of showing my
+drawings even to him."
+
+And now I was surprised to find how like grown women my daughters could
+talk. To me they always spoke like the children they were; but when I
+heard them now it seemed as if they had started all at once into ladies
+experienced in the ways of society. There they were chatting lightly,
+airily, and yet decidedly, a slight tone of badinage interwoven, with a
+young man of grace and dignity, whom they had only seen once before,
+and who had advanced no farther, with Connie at least, than a stately
+bow. They had, however, been a whole hour together before I arrived,
+and their mother had been with them all the while, which gives great
+courage to good girls, while, I am told, it shuts the mouths of those
+who are sly. But then it must be remembered that there are as great
+differences in mothers as in girls. And besides, I believe wise girls
+have an instinct about men that all the experience of other men cannot
+overtake. But yet again, there are many girls foolish enough to mistake
+a mere impulse for instinct, and vanity for insight.
+
+As Wynnie spoke, she turned and went back to the house to fetch some of
+her work. Now, had she been going a message for me, she would have gone
+like the wind; but on this occasion she stepped along in a stately
+manner, far from devoid of grace, but equally free from frolic or
+eagerness. And I could not help noting as well that Mr. Percivale's
+eyes followed her. What I felt or fancied is of no consequence to
+anybody. I do not think, even if I were writing an autobiography, I
+should be forced to tell _all_ about myself. But an autobiography is
+further from my fancy, however much I may have trenched upon its
+limits, than any other form of literature with which I am acquainted.
+
+She was not long in returning, however, though she came back with the
+same dignified motion.
+
+"There is nothing really worth either showing or concealing," she said
+to Mr. Percivale, as she handed him the portfolio, to help himself, as
+it were. She then turned away, as if a little feeling of shyness had
+come over her, and began to look for something to do about Connie. I
+could see that, although she had hitherto been almost indifferent about
+the merit of her drawings, she had a new-born wish that they might not
+appear altogether contemptible in the eyes of Mr. Percivale. And I saw,
+too, that Connie's wide eyes were taking in everything. It was
+wonderful how Connie's deprivations had made her keen in observing. Now
+she hastened to her sister's rescue even from such a slight
+inconvenience as the shadow of embarrassment in which she found
+herself--perhaps from having seen some unusual expression in my face,
+of which I was unconscious, though conscious enough of what might have
+occasioned such.
+
+"Give me your hand, Wynnie," said Connie, "and help me to move one inch
+further on my side.--I may move just that much on my side, mayn't I,
+papa?"
+
+"I think you had better not, my dear, if you can do without it," I
+answered; for the doctor's injunctions had been strong.
+
+"Very well, papa; but I feel as if it would do me good."
+
+"Mr. Turner will be here next week, you know; and you must try to stick
+to his rules till he comes to see you. Perhaps he will let you relax a
+little."
+
+Connie smiled very sweetly and lay still, while Wynnie stood holding
+her hand.
+
+Meantime Mr. Percivale, having received the drawings, had walked away
+with them towards what they called the storm tower--a little building
+standing square to the points of the compass, from little windows, in
+which the coastguard could see with their telescopes along the coast on
+both sides and far out to sea. This tower stood on the very edge of the
+cliff, but behind it there was a steep descent, to reach which
+apparently he went round the tower and disappeared. He evidently wanted
+to make a leisurely examination of the drawings--somewhat formidable
+for Wynnie, I thought. At the same time, it impressed me favourably
+with regard to the young man that he was not inclined to pay a set of
+stupid and untrue compliments the instant the portfolio was opened,
+but, on the contrary, in order to speak what was real about them, would
+take the trouble to make himself in some adequate measure acquainted
+with them. I therefore, to Wynnie's relief, I fear, strolled after him,
+seeing no harm in taking a peep at his person, while he was taking a
+peep at my daughter's mind. I went round the tower to the other side,
+and there saw him at a little distance below me, but further out on a
+great rock that overhung the sea, connected with the cliff by a long
+narrow isthmus, a few yards lower than the cliff itself, only just
+broad enough to admit of a footpath along its top, and on one side
+going sheer down with a smooth hard rock-face to the sands below. The
+other side was less steep, and had some grass upon it. But the path was
+too narrow, and the precipice too steep, for me to trust my head with
+the business of guiding my feet along it. So I stood and saw him from
+the mainland--saw his head at least bent over the drawings; saw how
+slowly he turned from one to the other; saw how, after having gone over
+them once, he turned to the beginning and went over them again, even
+more slowly than before; saw how he turned the third time to the first.
+Then, getting tired, I went back to the group on the down; caught sight
+of Charlie and Harry turning heels over head down the slope toward the
+house; found that my wife had gone home--in fact, that only Connie and
+Wynnie were left. The sun had disappeared under a cloud, and the sea
+had turned a little slaty; the yellow flowers in the short down-grass
+no longer caught the eye with their gold, and the wind that bent their
+tops had just the suspicion of an edge in it. And Wynnie's face looked
+a little cloudy too, I thought, and I feared that it was my fault. I
+fancied there was just a tinge of beseeching in Connie's eye, as I
+looked at her, thinking there might be danger for her in the
+sunlessness of the wind. But I do not know that all this, even the
+clouding of the sun, may not have come out of my own mind, the result
+of my not being quite satisfied with myself because of the mood I had
+been in. My feeling had altered considerably in the mean time.
+
+"Run, Wynnie, and ask Mr. Percivale, with my compliments, to come and
+lunch with us," I said--more to let her see I was not displeased,
+however I might have looked, than for any other reason. She
+went--sedately as before.
+
+Almost as soon as she was gone, I saw that I had put her in a
+difficulty. For I had discovered, very soon after coming into these
+parts, that her head was no more steady than my own on high places, for
+she up had never been used to such in our own level country, except,
+indeed, on the stair that led down to the old quarry and the well,
+where, I can remember now, she always laid her hand on the balustrade
+with some degree of tremor, although she had been in the way of going
+up and down from childhood. But if she could not cross that narrow and
+really dangerous isthmus, still less could she call to a man she had
+never seen but once, across the intervening chasm. I therefore set off
+after her, leaving Connie lying there in loneliness, between the sea
+and the sky. But when I got to the other side of the little tower,
+instead of finding her standing hesitating on the brink of action,
+there she was on the rock beyond. Mr. Percivale had risen, and was
+evidently giving an answer to my invitation; at least, the next moment
+she turned to come back, and he followed. I stood trembling almost to
+see her cross the knife-back of that ledge. If I had not been almost
+fascinated, I should have turned and left them to come together, lest
+the evil fancy should cross her mind that I was watching them, for it
+was one thing to watch him with her drawings, and quite another to
+watch him with herself. But I stood and stared as she crossed. In the
+middle of the path, however--up to which point she had been walking
+with perfect steadiness and composure--she lifted her eyes--by what
+influence I cannot tell--saw me, looked as if she saw ghost, half
+lifted her arms, swayed as if she would fall, and, indeed, was falling
+over the precipice when Percivale, who was close behind her caught her
+in his arms, almost too late for both of them. So nearly down was she
+already, that her weight bent him over the rocky side, till it seemed
+as if he must yield, or his body snap. For he bent from the waist, and
+looked as if his feet only kept a hold on the ground. It was all over
+in a moment, but in that moment it made a sun-picture on my brain,
+which returns, ever and again, with such vivid agony that I cannot hope
+to get rid of it till I get rid of the brain itself in which lies the
+impress. In another moment they were at my side--she with a wan,
+terrified smile, he in a ruddy alarm. I was unable to speak, and could
+only, with trembling steps, lead the way from the dreadful spot. I
+reproached myself afterwards for my want of faith in God; but I had not
+had time to correct myself yet. Without a word on their side either,
+they followed me. Before we reached Connie, I recovered myself
+sufficiently to say, "Not a word to Connie," and they understood me. I
+told Wynnie to run to the house, and send Walter to help me to carry
+Connie home. She went, and, until Walter came, I talked to Mr.
+Percivale as if nothing had happened. And what made me feel yet more
+friendly towards him was, that he did not do as some young men wishing
+to ingratiate themselves would have done: he did not offer to help me
+to carry Connie home. I saw that the offer rose in his mind, and that
+he repressed it. He understood that I must consider such a permission
+as a privilege not to be accorded to the acquaintance of a day; that I
+must know him better before I could allow the weight of my child to
+rest on his strength. I was even grateful to him for this knowledge of
+human nature. But he responded cordially to my invitation to lunch with
+us, and walked by my side as Walter and I bore the precious burden home.
+
+During our meal, he made himself quite agreeable; talked well on the
+topics of the day, not altogether as a man who had made up his mind,
+but not the less, rather the more, as a man who had thought about them,
+and one who did not find it so easy to come to a conclusion as most
+people do--or possibly as not feeling the necessity of coming to a
+conclusion, and therefore preferring to allow the conclusion to grow
+instead of constructing one for immediate use. This I rather liked than
+otherwise. His behaviour, I need hardly say, after what I have told of
+him already, was entirely that of a gentleman; and his education was
+good. But what I did not like was, that as often as the conversation
+made a bend in the direction of religious matters, he was sure to bend
+it away in some other direction as soon as ever he laid his next hold
+upon it. This, however, might have various reasons to account for it,
+and I would wait.
+
+After lunch, as we rose from the table, he took Wynnie's portfolio from
+the side-table where he had laid it, and with no more than a bow and
+thanks returned it to her. She, I thought, looked a little
+disappointed, though she said as lightly as she could:
+
+"I am afraid you have not found anything worthy of criticism in my poor
+attempts, Mr. Percivale?"
+
+"On the contrary, I shall be most happy to tell you what I think of
+them if you would like to hear the impression they have made upon me,"
+he replied, holding out his hand to take the portfolio again.
+
+"I shall be greatly obliged to you," she said, returning it, "for I
+have had no one to help me since I left school, except a book called
+_Modern Painters_, which I think has the most beautiful things in it I
+ever read, but which I lay down every now and then with a kind of
+despair, as if I never could do anything worth doing. How long the next
+volume is in coming! Do you know the author, Mr. Percivale?"
+
+"I wish I did. He has given me much help. I do not say I can agree with
+everything he writes; but when I do not, I have such a respect for him
+that I always feel as if he must be right whether he seems to me to be
+right or not. And if he is severe, it is with the severity of love that
+will speak only the truth."
+
+This last speech fell on my ear like the tone of a church bell. "That
+will do, my friend," thought I. But I said nothing to interrupt.
+
+By this time he had laid the portfolio open on the side-table, and
+placed a chair in front of it for my daughter. Then seating himself by
+her side, but without the least approach to familiarity, he began to
+talk to her about her drawings, praising, in general, the feeling, but
+finding fault with the want of nicety in the execution--at least so it
+appeared to me from what I could understand of the conversation.
+
+"But," said my daughter, "it seems to me that if you get the feeling
+right, that is the main thing."
+
+"No doubt," returned Mr. Percivale; "so much the main thing that any
+imperfection or coarseness or untruth which interferes with it becomes
+of the greatest consequence."
+
+"But can it really interfere with the feeling?"
+
+"Perhaps not with most people, simply because most people observe so
+badly that their recollections of nature are all blurred and blotted
+and indistinct, and therefore the imperfections we are speaking of do
+not affect them. But with the more cultivated it is otherwise. It is
+for them you ought to work, for you do not thereby lose the others.
+Besides, the feeling is always intensified by the finish, for that
+belongs to the feeling too, and must, I should think, have some
+influence even where it is not noted."
+
+"But is it not a hopeless thing to attempt the finish of nature?"
+
+"Not at all; to the degree, that is, in which you can represent
+anything else of nature. But in this drawing now you have no
+representative of, nothing to hint at or recall the feeling of the
+exquisiteness of nature's finish. Why should you not at least have
+drawn a true horizon-line there? Has the absolute truth of the meeting
+of sea and sky nothing to do with the feeling which such a landscape
+produces? I should have thought you would have learned that, if
+anything, from Mr. Ruskin."
+
+Mr. Percivale spoke earnestly. Wynnie, either from disappointment or
+despair, probably from a mixture of both, apparently fancied that, or
+rather felt as if, he was scolding her, and got cross. This was
+anything but dignified, especially with a stranger, and one who was
+doing his best to help her. And yet, somehow, I must with shame confess
+I was not altogether sorry to see it. In fact, my reader, I must just
+uncover my sin, and say that I felt a little jealous of Mr. Percivale.
+The negative reason was that I had not yet learned to love him. The
+only cure for jealousy is love. But I was ashamed too of Wynnie's
+behaving so childishly. Her face flushed, the tears came in her eyes,
+and she rose, saying, with a little choke in her voice--
+
+"I see it's no use trying. I won't intrude any more into things I am
+incapable of. I am much obliged to you, Mr. Percivale, for showing me
+how presumptuous I have been."
+
+The painter rose as she rose, looking greatly concerned. But he did not
+attempt to answer her. Indeed she gave him no time. He could only
+spring after her to open the door for her. A more than respectful bow
+as she left the room was his only adieu. But when he turned his face
+again towards me, it expressed even a degree of consternation.
+
+"I fear," he said, approaching me with an almost military step, much at
+variance with the shadow upon his countenance, "I fear I have been rude
+to Miss Walton, but nothing was farther--"
+
+"You mistake entirely, Mr. Percivale. I heard all you were saying, and
+you were not in the least rude. On the contrary, I consider you were
+very kind to take the trouble with her you did. Allow me to make the
+apology for my daughter which I am sure she will wish made when she
+recovers from the disappointment of finding more obstacles in the way
+of her favourite pursuit than she had previously supposed. She is only
+too ready to lose heart, and she paid too little attention to your
+approbation and too much--in proportion, I mean--to your--criticism.
+She felt discouraged and lost her temper, but more with herself and her
+poor attempts, I venture to assure you, than with your remarks upon
+them. She is too much given to despising her own efforts."
+
+"But I must have been to blame if I caused any such feeling with regard
+to those drawings, for I assure you they contain great promise."
+
+"I am glad you think so. That I should myself be of the same opinion
+can be of no consequence."
+
+"Miss Walton at least sees what ought to be represented. All she needs
+is greater severity in the quality of representation. And that would
+have grown without any remark from onlookers. Only a friendly criticism
+is sometimes a great help. It opens the eyes a little sooner than they
+would have opened of themselves. And time," he added, with a half sigh
+and with an appeal in his tone, as if he would justify himself to my
+conscience, "is half the battle in this world. It is over so soon."
+
+"No sooner than it ought to be," I rejoined.
+
+"So it may appear to you," he returned; "for you, I presume to
+conjecture, have worked hard and done much. I may or may not have
+worked hard--sometimes I think I have, sometimes I think I have
+not--but I certainly have done little. Here I am nearly thirty, and
+have made no mark on the world yet."
+
+"I don't know that that is of so much consequence," I said. "I have
+never hoped for more than to rub out a few of the marks already made."
+
+"Perhaps you are right," he returned. "Every man has something he can
+do, and more, I suppose, that he can't do. But I have no right to turn
+a visit into a visitation. Will you please tell Miss Walton that I am
+very sorry I presumed on the privileges of a drawing-master, and gave
+her pain. It was so far from my intention that it will be a lesson to
+me for the future."
+
+With these words he took his leave, and I could not help being greatly
+pleased both with them and with his bearing. He was clearly anything
+but a common man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE SHADOW OP DEATH.
+
+
+When Wynnie appeared at dinner she looked ashamed of herself, and her
+face betrayed that she had been crying. But I said nothing, for I had
+confidence that all she needed was time to come to herself, that the
+voice that speaks louder than any thunder might make its stillness
+heard. And when I came home from my walk the next morning I found Mr.
+Percivale once more in the group about Connie, and evidently on the
+best possible terms with all. The same afternoon Wynnie went out
+sketching with Dora. I had no doubt that she had made some sort of
+apology to Mr. Percivale; but I did not make the slightest attempt to
+discover what had passed between them, for though it is of all things
+desirable that children should be quite open with their parents, I was
+most anxious to lay upon them no burden of obligation. For such burden
+lies against the door of utterance, and makes it the more difficult to
+open. It paralyses the speech of the soul. What I desired was that they
+should trust me so that faith should overcome all difficulty that might
+lie in the way of their being open with me. That end is not to be
+gained by any urging of admonition. Against such, growing years at
+least, if nothing else, will bring a strong reaction. Nor even, if so
+gained would the gain be at all of the right sort. The openness would
+not be faith. Besides, a parent must respect the spiritual person of
+his child, and approach it with reverence, for that too looks the
+Father in the face, and has an audience with him into which no earthly
+parent can enter even if he dared to desire it. Therefore I trusted my
+child. And when I saw that she looked at me a little shyly when we next
+met, I only sought to show her the more tenderness and confidence,
+telling her all about my plans with the bells, and my talks with the
+smith and Mrs. Coombes. She listened with just such interest as I had
+always been accustomed to see in her, asking such questions, and making
+such remarks as I might have expected, but I still felt that there was
+the thread of a little uneasiness through the web of our
+intercourse,--such a thread of a false colour as one may sometimes find
+wandering through the labour of the loom, and seek with pains to draw
+from the woven stuff. But it was for Wynnie to take it out, not for me.
+And she did not leave it long. For as she bade me good-night in my
+study, she said suddenly, yet with hesitating openness,
+
+"Papa, I told Mr. Percivale that I was sorry I had behaved so badly
+about the drawings."
+
+"You did right, my child," I replied. At the same moment a pang of
+anxiety passed through me lest under the influence of her repentance
+she should have said anything more than becoming. But I banished the
+doubt instantly as faithlessness in the womanly instincts of my child.
+For we men are always so ready and anxious to keep women right, like
+the wretched creature, Laertes, in _Hamlet_, who reads his sister such
+a lesson on her maidenly duties, but declines almost with contempt to
+listen to a word from her as to any co-relative obligation on his side!
+
+And here I may remark in regard to one of the vexed questions of the
+day--the rights of women--that what women demand it is not for men to
+withhold. It is not their business to lay the law for women. That women
+must lay down for themselves. I confess that, although I must herein
+seem to many of my readers old-fashioned and conservative, I should not
+like to see any woman I cared much for either in parliament or in an
+anatomical class-room; but on the other hand I feel that women must be
+left free to settle that matter. If it is not good, good women will
+find it out and recoil from it. If it is good then God give them good
+speed. One thing they _have_ a right to--a far wider and more valuable
+education than they have been in the way of receiving. When the mothers
+are well taught the generations will grow in knowledge at a fourfold
+rate. But still the teaching of life is better than all the schools,
+and common sense than all learning. This common sense is a rare gift,
+scantier in none than in those who lay claim to it on the ground of
+following commonplace, worldly, and prudential maxims. But I must
+return to my Wynnie.
+
+"And what did Mr. Percivale say?" I resumed, for she was silent.
+
+"He took the blame all on himself, papa."
+
+"Like a gentleman," I said.
+
+"But I could not leave it so, you know, papa, because that was not the
+truth."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I told him that I had lost my temper from disappointment; that I had
+thought I did not care for my drawings because I was so far from
+satisfied with them, but when he made me feel that they were worth
+nothing, then I found from the vexation I felt that I had cared for
+them. But I do think, papa, I was more ashamed of having shown them,
+and vexed with myself, than cross with him. But I was very silly."
+
+"Well, and what did he say?"
+
+"He began to praise them then. But you know I could not take much of
+that, for what could he do?"
+
+"You might give him credit for a little honesty, at least."
+
+"Yes; but things may be true in a way, you know, and not mean much."
+
+"He seems to have succeeded in reconciling you to the prosecution of
+your efforts, however; for I saw you go out with your sketching
+apparatus this afternoon."
+
+"Yes," she answered shyly. "He was so kind that somehow I got heart to
+try again. He's very nice, isn't he?"
+
+My answer was not quite ready.
+
+"Don't you like him, papa?"
+
+"Well--I like him--yes. But we must not be in haste with our judgments,
+you know. I have had very little opportunity of seeing into him. There
+is much in him that I like, but--"
+
+"But what? please, papa."
+
+"To tell the truth then, Wynnie, for I can speak my mind to you, my
+child, there is a certain shyness of approaching the subject of
+religion; so that I have my fears lest he should belong to any of these
+new schools of a fragmentary philosophy which acknowledge no source of
+truth but the testimony of the senses and the deductions made therefrom
+by the intellect."
+
+"But is not that a hasty conclusion, papa?"
+
+"That is a hasty question, my dear. I have come to no conclusion. I was
+only speaking confidentially about my fears."
+
+"Perhaps, papa, it's only that he's not sure enough, and is afraid of
+appearing to profess more than he believes. I'm sure, if that's it, I
+have the greatest sympathy with him."
+
+I looked at her, and saw the tears gathering fast in her eyes.
+
+"Pray to God on the chance of his hearing you, my darling, and go to
+sleep," I said. "I will not think hardly of you because you cannot be
+so sure as I am. How could you be? You have not had my experience.
+Perhaps you are right about Mr. Percivale too. But it would be an
+awkward thing to get intimate with him, you know, and then find out
+that we did not like him after all. You couldn't like a man much, could
+you, who did not believe in anything greater than himself, anything
+marvellous, grand, beyond our understanding--who thought that he had
+come out of the dirt and was going back to the dirt?"
+
+"I could, papa, if he tried to do his duty notwithstanding--for I'm
+sure I couldn't. I should cry myself to death."
+
+"You are right, my child. I should honour him too. But I should be very
+sorry for him. For he would be so disappointed in himself."
+
+I do not know whether this was the best answer to make, but I had
+little time to think.
+
+"But you don't know that he's like that."
+
+"I do not, my dear. And more, I will not associate the idea with him
+till I know for certain. We will leave it to ignorant old ladies who
+lay claim to an instinct for theology to jump at conclusions, and
+reserve ours--as even such a man as we have been supposing might well
+teach us--till we have sufficient facts from which to draw them. Now go
+to bed, my child."
+
+"Good-night then, dear papa," she said, and left me with a kiss.
+
+I was not altogether comfortable after this conversation. I had tried
+to be fair to the young man both in word and thought, but I could not
+relish the idea of my daughter falling in love with him, which looked
+likely enough, before I knew more about him, and found that _more_ good
+and hope-giving. There was but one rational thing left to do, and that
+was to cast my care on him that careth for us--on the Father who loved
+my child more than even I could love her--and loved the young man too,
+and regarded my anxiety, and would take its cause upon himself. After I
+had lifted up my heart to him I was at ease, read a canto of Dante's
+_Paradise_, and then went to bed. The prematurity of a conversation
+with my wife, in which I found that she was very favourably impressed
+with Mr. Percivale, must be pardoned to the forecasting hearts of
+fathers and mothers.
+
+As I went out for my walk the next morning, I caught sight of the
+sexton, with whom as yet I had had but little communication, busily
+trimming some of the newer graves in the churchyard. I turned in
+through the nearer gate, which was fashioned like a lych-gate, with
+seats on the sides and a stone table in the centre, but had no roof.
+The one on the other side of the church was roofed, but probably they
+had found that here no roof could resist the sea-blasts in winter. The
+top of the wall where the roof should have rested, was simply covered
+with flat slates to protect it from the rain.
+
+"Good-morning, Coombes," I said.
+
+He turned up a wizened, humorous old face, the very type of a
+gravedigger's, and with one hand leaning on the edge of the green
+mound, upon which he had been cropping with a pair of shears the too
+long and too thin grass, touched his cap with the other, and bade me a
+cheerful good-morning in return.
+
+"You're making things tidy," I said.
+
+"It take time to make them all comfortable, you see, sir," he returned,
+taking up his shears again and clipping away at the top and sides of
+the mound.
+
+"You mean the dead, Coombes?"
+
+"Yes, sir; to be sure, sir."
+
+"You don't think it makes much difference to their comfort, do you,
+whether the grass is one length or another upon their graves?"
+
+"Well no, sir. I don't suppose it makes _much_ difference to them. But
+it look more comfortable, you know. And I like things to look
+comfortable. Don't you, sir?"
+
+"To be sure I do, Coombes. And you are quite right. The resting-place
+of the body, although the person it belonged to be far away, should be
+respected."
+
+"That's what I think, though I don't get no credit for it. I du believe
+the people hereabouts thinks me only a single hair better than a Jack
+Ketch. But I'm sure I du my best to make the poor things comfortable."
+
+He seemed unable to rid his mind of the idea that the comfort of the
+departed was dependent upon his ministrations.
+
+"The trouble I have with them sometimes! There's now this same one as
+lies here, old Jonathan Giles. He have the gout so bad! and just as I
+come within a couple o' inches o' the right depth, out come the edge of
+a great stone in the near corner at the foot of the bed. Thinks I,
+he'll never lie comfortable with that same under his gouty toe. But the
+trouble I had to get out that stone! I du assure you, sir, it took me
+nigh half the day.--But this be one of the nicest places to lie in all
+up and down the coast--a nice gravelly soil, you see, sir; dry, and
+warm, and comfortable. Them poor things as comes out of the sea must
+quite enjoy the change, sir."
+
+There was something grotesque in the man's persistence in regarding the
+objects of his interest from this point of view. It was a curious way
+for the humanity that was in him to find expression; but I did not like
+to let him go on thus. It was so much opposed to all that I believed
+and felt about the change from this world to the next!
+
+"But, Coombes," I said, "why will you go on talking as if it made an
+atom of difference to the dead bodies where they were buried? They care
+no more about it than your old coat would care where it was thrown
+after you had done with it."
+
+He turned and regarded his coat where it hung beside him on the
+headstone of the same grave at which he was working, shook his head
+with a smile that seemed to hint a doubt whether the said old coat
+would be altogether so indifferent to its treatment when, it was past
+use as I had implied. Then he turned again to his work, and after a
+moment's silence began to approach me from another side. I confess he
+had the better of me before I was aware of what he was about.
+
+"The church of Boscastle stands high on the cliff. You've been to
+Boscastle, sir?"
+
+I told him I had not yet, but hoped to go before the summer was over.
+
+"Ah, you should see Boscastle, sir. It's a wonderful place. That's
+where I was born, sir. When I was a by that church was haunted, sir.
+It's a damp place, and the wind in it awful. I du believe it stand
+higher than any church in the country, and have got more wind in it of
+a stormy night than any church whatsomever. Well, they said it was
+haunted; and sure enough every now and then there was a knocking heard
+down below. And this always took place of a stormy night, as if there
+was some poor thing down in the low wouts (_vaults_), and he wasn't
+comfortable and wanted to get out. Well, one night it was so plain and
+so fearful it was that the sexton he went and took the blacksmith and a
+ship's carpenter down to the harbour, and they go up together, and they
+hearken all over the floor, and they open one of the old family wouts
+that belongs to the Penhaligans, and they go down with a light. Now the
+wind it was a-blowing all as usual, only worse than common. And there
+to be sure what do they see but the wout half-full of sea-water, and
+nows and thens a great spout coming in through a hole in the rock; for
+it was high-water and a wind off the sea, as I tell you. And there was
+a coffin afloat on the water, and every time the spout come through, it
+set it knocking agen the side o' the wout, and that was the ghost."
+
+"What a horrible idea!" I said, with a half-shudder at the unrest of
+the dead.
+
+The old man uttered a queer long-drawn sound,--neither a chuckle, a
+crow, nor a laugh, but a mixture of all three,--and turned himself yet
+again to the work which, as he approached the end of his narration, he
+had suspended, that he might make his story _tell_, I suppose, by
+looking me in the face. And as he turned he said, "I thought you would
+like to be comfortable then as well as other people, sir."
+
+I could not help laughing to see how the cunning old fellow had caught
+me. I have not yet been able to find out how much of truth there was in
+his story. From the twinkle of his eye I cannot help suspecting that if
+he did not invent the tale, he embellished it, at least, in order to
+produce the effect which he certainly did produce. Humour was clearly
+his predominant disposition, the reflex of which was to be seen, after
+a mild lunar fashion, on the countenance of his wife. Neither could I
+help thinking with pleasure, as I turned away, how the merry little old
+man would enjoy telling his companions how he had posed the new parson.
+Very welcome was he to his laugh for my part. Yet I gladly left the
+churchyard, with its sunshine above and its darkness below. Indeed I
+had to look up to the glittering vanes on the four pinnacles of the
+church-tower, dwelling aloft in the clean sunny air, to get the feeling
+of the dark vault, and the floating coffin, and the knocking heard in
+the windy church, out of my brain. But the thing that did free me was
+the reflection with what supreme disregard the disincarcerated spirit
+would look upon any possible vicissitudes of its abandoned vault. For
+in proportion as the body of man's revelation ceases to be in harmony
+with the spirit that dwells therein, it becomes a vault, a prison, from
+which it must be freedom to escape at length. The house we like best
+would be a prison of awful sort if doors and windows were built up.
+Man's abode, as age begins to draw nigh, fares thus. Age is in fact the
+mason that builds up the doors and the windows, and death is the angel
+that breaks the prison-house and lets the captives free. Thus I got
+something out of the sexton's horrible story.
+
+But before the week was over, death came near indeed--in far other
+fashion than any funereal tale could have brought it.
+
+One day, after lunch, I had retired to my study, and was dozing in my
+chair, for the day was hot, when I was waked by Charlie rushing into
+the room with the cry, "Papa, papa, there's a man drowning."
+
+I started up, and hurried down to the drawing-room, which looked out
+over the bay. I could see nothing but people running about on the edge
+of the quiet waves. No sign of human being was on--the water. But the
+one boat belonging to the pilot was coming out from the shelter of the
+lock of the canal where it usually lay, and my friend of the coastguard
+was running down from the tower on the cliff with ropes in his hand. He
+would not stop the boat even for the moment it would need to take him
+on board, but threw them in and urged to haste. I stood at the window
+and watched. Every now and then I fancied I saw something white heaved
+up on the swell of a wave, and as often was satisfied that I had but
+fancied it. The boat seemed to be floating about lazily, if not idly.
+The eagerness to help made it appear as if nothing was going on. Could
+it, after all, have been a false alarm? Was there, after all, no
+insensible form swinging about in the sweep of those waves, with life
+gradually oozing away? Long, long as it seemed to me, I watched, and
+still the boat kept moving from place to place, so far out that I could
+see nothing distinctly of the motions of its crew. At length I saw
+something. Yes; a long white thing rose from the water slowly, and was
+drawn into the boat. It rowed swiftly to the shore. There was but one
+place fit to land upon,--a little patch of sand, nearly covered at
+high-water, but now lying yellow in the sun, under the window at which
+I stood, and immediately under our garden-wall. Thither the boat shot
+along; and there my friend of the coastguard, earnest and sad, was
+waiting to use, though without hope, every appliance so well known to
+him from the frequent occurrence of such necessity in the course of his
+watchful duties along miles and miles of stormy coast.
+
+I will not linger over the sad details of vain endeavour. The honoured
+head of a family, he had departed and left a good name behind him. But
+even in the midst of my poor attentions to the quiet, speechless,
+pale-faced wife, who sat at the head of the corpse, I could not help
+feeling anxious about the effect on my Connie. It was impossible to
+keep the matter concealed from her. The undoubted concern on the faces
+of the two boys was enough to reveal that something serious and painful
+had occurred; while my wife and Wynnie, and indeed the whole household,
+were busy in attending to every remotest suggestion of aid that reached
+them from the little crowd gathered about the body. At length it was
+concluded, on the verdict of the medical man who had been sent for,
+that all further effort was useless. The body was borne away, and I led
+the poor lady to her lodging, and remained there with her till I found
+that, as she lay on the sofa, the sleep that so often dogs the steps of
+sorrow had at length thrown its veil over her consciousness, and put
+her for the time to rest. There is a gentle consolation in the firmness
+of the grasp of the inevitable, known but to those who are led through
+the valley of the shadow. I left her with her son and daughter, and
+returned to my own family. They too were of course in the skirts of the
+cloud. Had they only heard of the occurrence, it would have had little
+effect; but death had appeared to them. Everyone but Connie had seen
+the dead lying there; and before the day was over, I wished that she
+too had seen the dead. For I found from what she said at intervals, and
+from the shudder that now and then passed through her, that her
+imagination was at work, showing but the horrors that belong to death;
+for the enfolding peace that accompanies it can be known but by sight
+of the dead. When I spoke to her, she seemed, and I suppose for the
+time felt tolerably quiet and comfortable; but I could see that the
+words she had heard fall in the going and coming, and the
+communications of Charlie and Harry to each other, had made as it were
+an excoriation on her fancy, to which her consciousness was ever
+returning. And now I became more grateful than I had yet been for the
+gift of that gipsy-child. For I felt no anxiety about Connie so long as
+she was with her. The presence even of her mother could not relieve
+her, for she and Wynnie were both clouded with the same awe, and its
+reflex in Connie was distorted by her fancy. But the sweet ignorance of
+the baby, which rightly considered is more than a type or symbol of
+faith, operated most healingly; for she appeared in her sweet merry
+ways--no baby was ever more filled with the mere gladness of life than
+Connie's baby--to the mood in which they all were, like a little sunny
+window in a cathedral crypt, telling of a whole universe of sunshine
+and motion beyond those oppressed pillars and low-groined arches. And
+why should not the baby know best? I believe the babies do know best. I
+therefore favoured her having the child more than I might otherwise
+have thought good for her, being anxious to get the dreary, unhealthy
+impression healed as soon as possible, lest it should, in the delicate
+physical condition in which she was, turn to a sore.
+
+But my wife suffered for a time nearly as much as Connie. As long as
+she was going about the house or attending to the wants of her family,
+she was free; but no sooner did she lay her head on the pillow than in
+rushed the cry of the sea, fierce, unkind, craving like a wild beast.
+Again and again she spoke of it to me, for it came to her mingled with
+the voice of the tempter, saying, "_Cruel chance_," over and over
+again. For although the two words contradict each other when put
+together thus, each in its turn would assert itself.
+
+A great part of the doubt in the world comes from the fact that there
+are in it so many more of the impressible as compared with the
+originating minds. Where the openness to impression is balanced by the
+power of production, the painful questions of the world are speedily
+met by their answers; where such is not the case, there are often long
+periods of suffering till the child-answer of truth is brought to the
+birth. Hence the need for every impressible mind to be, by reading or
+speech, held in living association with an original mind able to combat
+those suggestions of doubt and even unbelief, which the look of things
+must often occasion--a look which comes from our inability to gain
+other than fragmentary visions of the work that the Father worketh
+hitherto. When the kingdom of heaven is at hand, one sign thereof will
+be that all clergymen will be more or less of the latter sort, and mere
+receptive goodness, no more than education and moral character, will be
+considered sufficient reason for a man's occupying the high position of
+an instructor of his fellows. But even now this possession of original
+power is not by any means to be limited to those who make public show
+of the same. In many a humble parish priest it shows itself at the
+bedside of the suffering, or in the admonition of the closet, although
+as yet there are many of the clergy who, so far from being able to
+console wisely, are incapable of understanding the condition of those
+that need consolation.
+
+"It is all a fancy, my dear," I said to her. "There is nothing more
+terrible in this than in any other death. On the contrary, I can hardly
+imagine a less fearful one. A big wave falls on the man's head and
+stuns him, and without further suffering he floats gently out on the
+sea of the unknown."
+
+"But it is so terrible for those left behind!"
+
+"Had you seen the face of his widow, so gentle, so loving, so resigned
+in its pallor, you would not have thought it so _terrible_."
+
+But though she always seemed satisfied, and no doubt felt nearly so,
+after any conversation of the sort, yet every night she would call out
+once and again, "O, that sea, out there!" I was very glad indeed when
+Mr. Turner, who had arranged to spend a short holiday with us, arrived.
+
+He was concerned at the news I gave him of the shock both Connie and
+her mother had received, and counselled an immediate change, that time
+might, in the absence of surrounding associations, obliterate something
+of the impression that had been made. The consequence was, that we
+resolved to remove our household, for a short time, to some place not
+too far off to permit of my attending to my duties at Kilkhaven, but
+out of the sight and sound of the sea. It was Thursday when Mr. Turner
+arrived, and he spent the next two days in inquiring and looking about
+for a suitable spot to which we might repair as early in the week as
+possible.
+
+On the Saturday the blacksmith was busy in the church-tower, and I went
+in to see how he was getting on.
+
+"You had a sad business here the last week, sir," he said, after we had
+done talking about the repairs.
+
+"A very sad business indeed," I answered.
+
+"It was a warning to us all," he said.
+
+"We may well take it so," I returned. "But it seems to me that we are
+too ready to think of such remarkable things only by themselves,
+instead of being roused by them to regard everything, common and
+uncommon, as ordered by the same care and wisdom."
+
+"One of our local preachers made a grand use of it."
+
+I made no reply. He resumed.
+
+"They tell me you took no notice of it last Sunday, sir."
+
+"I made no immediate allusion to it, certainly. But I preached under
+the influence of it. And I thought it better that those who could
+reflect on the matter should be thus led to think for themselves than
+that they should be subjected to the reception of my thoughts and
+feelings about it; for in the main it is life and not death that we
+have to preach."
+
+"I don't quite understand you, sir. But then you don't care much for
+preaching in your church."
+
+"I confess," I answered, "that there has been much indifference on that
+point. I could, however, mention to you many and grand exceptions.
+Still there is, even in some of the best in the church, a great amount
+of disbelief in the efficacy of preaching. And I allow that a great
+deal of what is called preaching, partakes of its nature only in the
+remotest degree. But, while I hold a strong opinion of its value--that
+is, where it is genuine--I venture just to suggest that the nature of
+the preaching to which the body you belong to has resorted, has had
+something to do, by way of a reaction, in driving the church to the
+other extreme."
+
+"How do you mean that, sir?"
+
+"You try to work upon people's feelings without reference to their
+judgment. Anyone who can preach what you call rousing sermons is
+considered a grand preacher amongst you, and there is a great danger of
+his being led thereby to talk more nonsense than sense. And then when
+the excitement goes off, there is no seed left in the soil to grow in
+peace, and they are always craving after more excitement."
+
+"Well, there is the preacher to rouse them up again."
+
+"And the consequence is that they continue like children--the good
+ones, I mean--and have hardly a chance of making a calm, deliberate
+choice of that which is good; while those who have been only excited
+and nothing more, are hardened and seared by the recurrence of such
+feeling as is neither aroused by truth nor followed by action."
+
+"You daren't talk like that if you knew the kind of people in this
+country that the Methodists, as you call them, have got a hold of. They
+tell me it was like hell itself down in those mines before Wesley come
+among them."
+
+"I should be a fool or a bigot to doubt that the Wesleyans have done
+incalculable good in the country. And that not alone to the people who
+never went to church. The whole Church of England is under obligations
+to Methodism such as no words can overstate."
+
+"I wonder you can say such things against them, then."
+
+"Now there you show the evil of thinking too much about the party you
+belong to. It makes a man touchy; and then he fancies when another is
+merely, it may be, analysing a difference, or insisting strongly on
+some great truth, that he is talking against his party."
+
+"But you said, sir, that our clergy don't care about moving our
+judgments, only our feelings. Now I know preachers amongst us of whom
+that would be anything but true."
+
+"Of course there must be. But there is what I say--your party-feeling
+makes you touchy. A man can't always be saying in the press of
+utterance, '_Of course there are exceptions_.' That is understood. I
+confess I do not know much about your clergy, for I have not had the
+opportunity. But I do know this, that some of the best and most liberal
+people I have ever known have belonged to your community."
+
+"They do gather a deal of money for good purposes."
+
+"Yes. But that was not what I meant by _liberal_. It is far easier to
+give money than to be generous in judgment. I meant by _liberal_, able
+to see the good and true in people that differ from you--glad to be
+roused to the reception of truth in God's name from whatever quarter it
+may come, and not readily finding offence where a remark may have
+chanced to be too sweeping or unguarded. But I see that I ought to be
+more careful, for I have made you, who certainly are not one of the
+quarrelsome people I have been speaking of, misunderstand me."
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir. I was hasty. But I do think I am more ready to
+lose my temper since--"
+
+Here he stopped. A fit of coughing came on, and, to my concern, was
+followed by what I saw plainly could be the result only of a rupture in
+the lungs. I insisted on his dropping his work and coming home with me,
+where I made him rest the remainder of the day and all Sunday, sending
+word to his mother that I could not let him go home. When we left on
+the Monday morning, we took him with us in the carriage hired for the
+journey, and set him down at his mother's, apparently no worse than
+usual.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+AT THE FARM.
+
+
+Leaving the younger members of the family at home with the servants, we
+set out for a farmhouse, some twenty miles off, which Turner had
+discovered for us. Connie had stood the journey down so well, and was
+now so much stronger, that we had no anxiety about her so far as
+regarded the travelling. Through deep lanes with many cottages, and
+here and there a very ugly little chapel, over steep hills, up which
+Turner and Wynnie and I walked, and along sterile moors we drove,
+stopping at roadside inns, and often besides to raise Connie and let
+her look about upon the extended prospect, so that it was drawing
+towards evening before we arrived at our destination. On the way Turner
+had warned us that we were not to expect a beautiful country, although
+the place was within reach of much that was remarkable. Therefore we
+were not surprised when we drew up at the door of a bare-looking,
+shelterless house, with scarcely a tree in sight, and a stretch of
+undulating fields on every side.
+
+"A dreary place in winter, Turner," I said, after we had seen Connie
+comfortably deposited in the nice white-curtained parlour, smelling of
+dried roses even in the height of the fresh ones, and had strolled out
+while our tea--dinner was being got ready for us.
+
+"Not a doubt of it; but just the place I wanted for Miss Connie," he
+replied. "We are high above the sea, and the air is very bracing, and
+not, at this season, too cold. A month later I should not on any
+account have brought her here."
+
+"I think even now there is a certain freshness in the wind that calls
+up a kind of will in the nerves to meet it."
+
+"That is precisely what I wanted for you all. You observe there is no
+rasp in its touch, however. There are regions in this island of ours
+where even in the hottest day in summer you would frequently discover a
+certain unfriendly edge in the air, that would set you wondering
+whether the seasons had not changed since you were a boy, and used to
+lie on the grass half the idle day."
+
+"I often do wonder whether it may not be so, but I always come to the
+conclusion that even this is but an example of the involuntary tendency
+of the mind of man towards the ideal. He forgets all that comes between
+and divides the hints of perfection scattered here and there along the
+scope of his experience. I especially remember one summer day in my
+childhood, which has coloured all my ideas of summer and bliss and
+fulfilment of content. It is made up of only mossy grass, and the scent
+of the earth and wild flowers, and hot sun, and perfect sky--deep and
+blue, and traversed by blinding white clouds. I could not have been
+more than five or six, I think, from the kind of dress I wore, the very
+pearl buttons of which, encircled on their face with a ring of
+half-spherical hollows, have their undeniable relation in my memory to
+the heavens and the earth, to the march of the glorious clouds, and the
+tender scent of the rooted flowers; and, indeed, when I think of it,
+must, by the delight they gave me, have opened my mind the more to the
+enjoyment of the eternal paradise around me. What a thing it is to
+please a child!"
+
+"I know what you mean perfectly," answered Turner. "It is as I get
+older that I understand what Wordsworth says about childhood. It is
+indeed a mercy that we were not born grown men, with what we consider
+our wits about us. They are blinding things those wits we gather. I
+fancy that the single thread by which God sometimes keeps hold of a man
+is such an impression of his childhood as that of which you have been
+speaking."
+
+"I do not doubt it; for conscience is so near in all those memories to
+which you refer. The whole surrounding of them is so at variance with
+sin! A sense of purity, not in himself, for the child is not feeling
+that he is pure, is all about him; and when afterwards the condition
+returns upon him,--returns when he is conscious of so much that is evil
+and so much that is unsatisfied in him,--it brings with it a longing
+after the high clear air of moral well-being."
+
+"Do you think, then, that it is only by association that nature thus
+impresses us? that she has no power of meaning these things?"
+
+"Not at all. No doubt there is something in the recollection of the
+associations of childhood to strengthen the power of nature upon us;
+but the power is in nature herself, else it would be but a poor weak
+thing to what it is. There _is_ purity and state in that sky. There
+_is_ a peace now in this wide still earth--not so very beautiful, you
+own--and in that overhanging blue, which my heart cries out that it
+needs and cannot be well till it gains--gains in the truth, gains in
+God, who is the power of truth, the living and causing truth. There is
+indeed a rest that remaineth, a rest pictured out even here this night,
+to rouse my dull heart to desire it and follow after it, a rest that
+consists in thinking the thoughts of Him who is the Peace because the
+Unity, in being filled with that spirit which now pictures itself forth
+in this repose of the heavens and the earth."
+
+"True," said Turner, after a pause. "I must think more about such
+things. The science the present day is going wild about will not give
+us that rest."
+
+"No; but that rest will do much to give you that science. A man with
+this repose in his heart will do more by far, other capabilities being
+equal, to find out the laws that govern things. For all law is living
+rest."
+
+"What you have been saying," resumed Turner, after another pause,
+"reminds me much of one of Wordsworth's poems. I do not mean the famous
+ode."
+
+"You mean the 'Ninth Evening Voluntary,' I know--one of his finest and
+truest and deepest poems. It begins, 'Had this effulgence disappeared.'"
+
+"Yes, that is the one I mean. I shall read it again when I go home. But
+you don't agree with Wordsworth, do you, about our having had an
+existence previous to this?"
+
+He gave a little laugh as he asked the question.
+
+"Not in the least. But an opinion held by such men as Plato, Origen,
+and Wordsworth, is not to be laughed at, Mr. Turner. It cannot be in
+its nature absurd. I might have mentioned Shelley as holding it, too,
+had his opinion been worth anything."
+
+"Then you don't think much of Shelley?"
+
+"I think his _feeling_ most valuable; his _opinion_ nearly worthless."
+
+"Well, perhaps I had no business to laugh, at it; but--"
+
+"Do not suppose for a moment that I even lean to it. I dislike it. It
+would make me unhappy to think there was the least of sound argument
+for it. But I respect the men who have held it, and know there must be
+_something_ good in it, else they could not have held it."
+
+"Are you able then to sympathise with that ode of Wordsworth's? Does it
+not depend for all its worth on the admission of this theory?"
+
+"Not in the least. Is it necessary to admit that we must have had a
+conscious life before this life to find meaning in the words,--
+
+  'But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+  From God who is our home'?
+
+Is not all the good in us his image? Imperfect and sinful as we are, is
+not all the foundation of our being his image? Is not the sin all ours,
+and the life in us all God's? We cannot be the creatures of God without
+partaking of his nature. Every motion of our conscience, every
+admiration of what is pure and noble, is a sign and a result of this.
+Is not every self-accusation a proof of the presence of his spirit?
+That comes not of ourselves--that is not without him. These are the
+clouds of glory we come trailing from him. All feelings of beauty and
+peace and loveliness and right and goodness, we trail with us from our
+home. God is the only home of the human soul. To interpret in this
+manner what Wordsworth says, will enable us to enter into perfect
+sympathy with all that grandest of his poems. I do not say this is what
+he meant; but I think it includes what he meant by being greater and
+wider than what he meant. Nor am I guilty of presumption in saying so,
+for surely the idea that we are born of God is a greater idea than that
+we have lived with him a life before this life. But Wordsworth is not
+the first among our religious poets to give us at least what is
+valuable in the notion. I came upon a volume amongst my friend
+Shepherd's books, with which I had made no acquaintance before--Henry
+Vaughan's poems. I brought it with me, for it has finer lines, I almost
+think, than any in George Herbert, though not so fine poems by any
+means as his best. When we go into the house I will read one of them to
+you."
+
+"Thank you," said Turner. "I wish I could have such talk once a week.
+The shades of the prison-house, you know, Mr. Walton, are always trying
+to close about us, and shut out the vision of the glories we have come
+from, as Wordsworth says."
+
+"A man," I answered, "who ministers to the miserable necessities of his
+fellows has even more need than another to believe in the light and the
+gladness--else a poor Job's comforter will he be. _I_ don't want to be
+treated like a musical snuff-box."
+
+The doctor laughed.
+
+"No man can _prove_," he said, "that there is not a being inside the
+snuff-box, existing in virtue of the harmony of its parts, comfortable
+when they go well, sick when they go badly, and dying when it is
+dismembered, or even when it stops."
+
+"No," I answered. "No man can prove it. But no man can convince a human
+being of it. And just as little can anyone convince me that my
+conscience, making me do sometimes what I _don't_ like, comes from a
+harmonious action of the particles of my brain. But it is time we went
+in, for by the law of things in general, I being ready for my dinner,
+my dinner ought to be ready for me."
+
+"A law with more exceptions than instances, I fear," said Turner.
+
+"I doubt that," I answered. "The readiness is everything, and that we
+constantly blunder in. But we had better see whether we are really
+ready for it, by trying whether it is ready for us."
+
+Connie went to bed early, as indeed we all did, and she was rather
+better than worse the next morning. My wife, for the first time for
+many nights, said nothing about the crying of the sea. The following
+day Turner and I set out to explore the neighbourhood. The rest
+remained quietly at home.
+
+It was, as I have said, a high bare country. The fields lay side by
+side, parted from each other chiefly, as so often in Scotland, by stone
+walls; and these stones being of a laminated nature, the walls were not
+unfrequently built by laying thin plates on their edges, which gave a
+neatness to them not found in other parts of the country as far as I am
+aware. In the middle of the fields came here and there patches of yet
+unreclaimed moorland.
+
+Now in a region like this, beauty must be looked for below the surface.
+There is a probability of finding hollows of repose, sunken spots of
+loveliness, hidden away altogether from the general aspect of
+sternness, or perhaps sterility, that meets the eye in glancing over
+the outspread landscape; just as in the natures of stern men you may
+expect to find, if opportunity should be afforded you, sunny spots of
+tender verdure, kept ever green by that very sternness which is turned
+towards the common gaze--thus existent because they are below the
+surface, and not laid bare to the sweep of the cold winds that roam the
+world. How often have not men started with amaze at the discovery of
+some feminine sweetness, some grace of protection in the man whom they
+had judged cold and hard and rugged, inaccessible to the more genial
+influences of humanity! It may be that such men are only fighting
+against the wind, and keep their hearts open to the sun.
+
+I knew this; and when Turner and I set out that morning to explore, I
+expected to light upon some instance of it--some mine or other in which
+nature had hidden away rare jewels; but I was not prepared to find such
+as I did find. With our hearts full of a glad secret we returned home,
+but we said nothing about it, in order that Ethelwyn and Wynnie might
+enjoy the discovery even as we had enjoyed it.
+
+There was another grand fact with regard to the neighbourhood about
+which we judged it better to be silent for a few days, that the inland
+influences might be free to work. We were considerably nearer the ocean
+than my wife and daughters supposed, for we had made a great round in
+order to arrive from the land-side. We were, however, out of the sound
+of its waves, which broke all along the shore, in this part, at the
+foot of tremendous cliffs. What cliffs they were we shall soon find.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE KEEVE.
+
+
+"Now, my dear! now, Wynnie!" I said, after prayers the next morning,
+"you must come out for a walk as soon as ever you can get your bonnets
+on."
+
+"But we can't leave Connie, papa," objected Wynnie.
+
+"O, yes, you can, quite well. There's nursie to look after her. What do
+you say, Connie?"
+
+For, for some time now, Connie had been able to get up so early, that
+it was no unusual thing to have prayers in her room.
+
+"I am entirely independent of help from my family," returned Connie
+grandiloquently. "I am a woman of independent means," she added. "If
+you say another word, I will rise and leave the room."
+
+And she made a movement as if she would actually do as she had said.
+Seized with an involuntary terror, I rushed towards her, and the
+impertinent girl burst out laughing in my face--threw herself back on
+her pillows, and laughed delightedly.
+
+"Take care, papa," she said. "I carry a terrible club for rebellious
+people." Then, her mood changing, she added, as if to suppress the
+tears gathering in her eyes, "I am the queen--of luxury and
+self-will--and I won't have anybody come near me till dinner-time. I
+mean to enjoy myself."
+
+So the matter was settled, and we went out for our walk. Ethelwyn was
+not such a good walker as she had been; but even if she had retained
+the strength of her youth, we should not have got on much the better
+for it--so often did she and Wynnie stop to grub ferns out of the
+chinks and roots of the stone-walls. Now, I admire ferns as much as
+anybody--that is, not, I fear, so much as my wife and daughter, but
+quite enough notwithstanding--but I do not quite enjoy being pulled up
+like a fern at every turn.
+
+"Now, my dear, what is the use of stopping to torture that harmless
+vegetable?" I say, but say in vain. "It is much more beautiful where it
+is than it will be anywhere where you can put it. Besides, you know
+they never come to anything with you. They _always_ die."
+
+Thereupon my wife reminds me of this fern and that fern, gathered in
+such and such places, and now in such and such corners of the garden or
+the greenhouse, or under glass-shades in this or that room, of the very
+existence of which I am ignorant, whether from original inattention, or
+merely from forgetfulness, I do not know. Certainly, out of their own
+place I do not care much for them.
+
+At length, partly by the inducement I held out to them of a much
+greater variety of ferns where we were bound, I succeeded in getting
+them over the two miles in little more than two hours. After passing
+from the lanes into the fields, our way led downwards till we reached a
+very steep large slope, with a delightful southern exposure, and
+covered with the sweetest down-grasses. It was just the place to lie
+in, as on the edge of the earth, and look abroad upon the universe of
+air and floating worlds.
+
+"Let us have a rest here, Ethel," I said. "I am sure this is much more
+delightful than uprooting ferns. What an awful thing to think that here
+we are on this great round tumbling ball of a world, held by the feet,
+and lifting up the head into infinite space--without choice or wish of
+our own--compelled to think and to be, whether we will or not! Just God
+must know it to be very good, or he would not have taken it in his
+hands to make individual lives without a possible will of theirs. He
+must be our Father, or we are wretched creatures--the slaves of a fatal
+necessity! Did it ever strike you, Turner, that each one of us stands
+on the apex of the world? With a sphere, you know, it must be so. And
+thus is typified, as it seems to me, that each one of us must look up
+for himself to find God, and then look abroad to find his fellows."
+
+"I think I know what you mean," was all Turner's reply.
+
+"No doubt," I resumed, "the apprehension of this truth has, in
+otherwise ill-ordered minds, given rise to all sorts of fierce and
+grotesque fanaticism. But the minds which have thus conceived the
+truth, would have been immeasurably worse without it; nay, this truth
+affords at last the only possible door out of the miseries of their own
+chaos, whether inherited or the result of their own misconduct."
+
+"What's that in the grass?" cried Wynnie, in a tone of alarm.
+
+I looked where she indicated, and saw a slow-worm, or blind-worm, lying
+basking in the sun. I rose and went towards it.
+
+"Here's your stick," said Turner.
+
+"What for?" I asked. "Why should I kill it? It is perfectly harmless,
+and, to my mind, beautiful."
+
+I took it in my hands, and brought it to my wife. She gave an
+involuntary shudder as it came near her.
+
+"I assure you it is harmless," I said, "though it has a forked tongue."
+And I opened its mouth as I spoke. "I do not think the serpent form is
+essentially ugly."
+
+"It makes me feel ugly," said Wynnie.
+
+"I allow I do not quite understand the mystery of it," I said. "But you
+never saw lovelier ornamentation than these silvery scales, with all
+the neatness of what you ladies call a set pattern, and none of the
+stiffness, for there are not two of them the same in form. And you
+never saw lovelier curves than this little patient creature, which does
+not even try to get away from me, makes with the queer long thin body
+of him."
+
+"I wonder how it can look after its tail, it is so far off," said
+Wynnie.
+
+"It does though--better than you ladies look after your long dresses. I
+wonder whether it is descended from creatures that once had feet, and
+did not make a good use of them. Perhaps they had wings even, and would
+not use them at all, and so lost them. Its ancestors may have had
+poison-fangs; it is innocent enough. But it is a terrible thing to be
+all feet, is it not? There is an awful significance in the condemnation
+of the serpent--'On thy belly shalt thou go, and eat dust.' But it is
+better to talk of beautiful things. _My_ soul at least has dropped from
+its world apex. Let us go on. Come, wife. Come, Turner."
+
+They did not seem willing to rise. But the glen drew me. I rose, and my
+wife followed my example with the help of my hand. She returned to the
+subject, however, as we descended the slope.
+
+"Is it possible that in the course of ever so many ages wings and feet
+should be both lost?" she said.
+
+"The most presumptuous thing in the world is to pronounce on the
+possible and the impossible. I do not know what is possible and what is
+impossible. I can only tell a little of what is true and what is
+untrue. But I do say this, that between the condition of many decent
+members of society and that for the sake of which God made them, there
+is a gulf quite as vast as that between a serpent and a bird. I get
+peeps now and then into the condition of my own heart, which, for the
+moment, make it seem impossible that I should ever rise into a true
+state of nature--that is, into the simplicity of God's will concerning
+me. The only hope for ourselves and for others lies in him--in the
+power the creating spirit has over the spirits he has made."
+
+By this time the descent on the grass was getting too steep and
+slippery to admit of our continuing to advance in that direction. We
+turned, therefore, down the valley in the direction of the sea. It was
+but a narrow cleft, and narrowed much towards a deeper cleft, in which
+we now saw the tops of trees, and from which we heard the rush of
+water. Nor had we gone far in this direction before we came upon a gate
+in a stone wall, which led into what seemed a neglected garden. We
+entered, and found a path turning and winding, among small trees, and
+luxuriant ferns, and great stones, and fragments of ruins down towards
+the bottom of the chasm. The noise of falling water increased as we
+went on, and at length, after some scrambling and several sharp turns,
+we found ourselves with a nearly precipitous wall on each side, clothed
+with shrubs and ivy, and creeping things of the vegetable world. Up
+this cleft there was no advance. The head of it was a precipice down
+which shot the stream from the vale above, pouring out of a deep slit
+it had itself cut in the rock as with a knife. Halfway down, it tumbled
+into a great basin of hollowed stone, and flowing from a chasm in its
+side, which left part of the lip of the basin standing like the arch of
+a vanished bridge, it fell into a black pool below, whence it crept as
+if half-stunned or weary down the gentle decline of the ravine. It was
+a perfect little picture. I, for my part, had never seen such a
+picturesque fall. It was a little gem of nature, complete in effect.
+The ladies were full of pleasure. Wynnie, forgetting her usual reserve,
+broke out in frantic exclamations of delight.
+
+We stood for a while regarding the ceaseless pour of the water down the
+precipice, here shot slanting in a little trough of the rock, full of
+force and purpose, here falling in great curls of green and gray, with
+an expression of absolute helplessness and conscious perdition, as if
+sheer to the centre, but rejoicing the next moment to find itself
+brought up boiling and bubbling in the basin, to issue in the gathered
+hope of experience. Then we turned down the stream a little way,
+crossed it by a plank, and stood again to regard it from the opposite
+side. Small as the whole affair was--not more than about a hundred and
+fifty feet in height--it was so full of variety that I saw it was all
+my memory could do, if it carried away anything like a correct picture
+of its aspect. I was contemplating it fixedly, when a little stifled
+cry from Wynnie made me start and look round. Her face was flushed, yet
+she was trying to look unconcerned.
+
+"I thought we were quite alone, papa," she said; "but I see a gentleman
+sketching."
+
+I looked whither she indicated. A little way down, the bed of the
+ravine widened considerably, and was no doubt filled with water in
+rainy weather. Now it was swampy--full of reeds and willow bushes. But
+on the opposite side of the stream, with a little canal from it going
+all around it, lay a great flat rectangular stone, not more than a foot
+above the level of the water, and upon a camp-stool in the centre of
+this stone sat a gentleman sketching. I had no doubt that Wynnie had
+recognised him at once. And I was annoyed, and indeed angry, to think
+that Mr. Percivale had followed us here. But while I regarded him, he
+looked up, rose very quietly, and, with his pencil in his hand, came
+towards us. With no nearer approach to familiarity than a bow, and no
+expression of either much pleasure or any surprise, he said--
+
+"I have seen your party for some time, Mr. Walton--since you crossed
+the stream; but I would not break in upon your enjoyment with the
+surprise which my presence here must cause you."
+
+I suppose I answered with a bow of some sort; for I could not say with
+truth that I was glad to see him. He resumed, doubtless penetrating my
+suspicion--
+
+"I have been here almost a week. I certainly had no expectation of the
+pleasure of seeing you."
+
+This he said lightly, though no doubt with the object of clearing
+himself. And I was, if not reassured, yet disarmed, by his statement;
+for I could not believe, from what I knew of him, that he would be
+guilty of such a white lie as many a gentleman would have thought
+justifiable on the occasion. Still, I suppose he found me a little
+stiff, for presently he said--
+
+"If you will excuse me, I will return to my work."
+
+Then I felt as if I must say something, for I had shown him no courtesy
+during the interview.
+
+"It must be a great pleasure to carry away such talismans with
+you--capable of bringing the place back to your mental vision at any
+moment."
+
+"To tell the truth," he answered, "I am a little ashamed of being found
+sketching here. Such bits of scenery are not of my favourite studies.
+But it is a change."
+
+"It is very beautiful here," I said, in a tone of contravention.
+
+"It is very pretty," he answered--"very lovely, if you will--not very
+beautiful, I think. I would keep that word for things of larger regard.
+Beauty requires width, and here is none. I had almost said this place
+was fanciful--the work of imagination in her play-hours, not in her
+large serious moods. It affects me like the face of a woman only
+pretty, about which boys and guardsmen will rave--to me not very
+interesting, save for its single lines."
+
+"Why, then, do you sketch the place?"
+
+"A very fair question," he returned, with a smile. "Just because it is
+soothing from the very absence of beauty. I would far rather, however,
+if I were only following my taste, take the barest bit of the moor
+above, with a streak of the cold sky over it. That gives room."
+
+"You would like to put a skylark in it, wouldn't you?"
+
+"That I would if I knew how. I see you know what I mean. But the mere
+romantic I never had much taste for; though if you saw the kind of
+pictures I try to paint, you would not wonder that I take sketches of
+places like this, while in my heart of hearts I do not care much for
+them. They are so different, and just _therefore_ they are good for me.
+I am not working now; I am only playing."
+
+"With a view to working better afterwards, I have no doubt," I answered.
+
+"You are right there, I hope," was his quiet reply, as he turned and
+walked back to the island.
+
+He had not made a step towards joining us. He had only taken his hat
+off to the ladies. He was gaining ground upon me rapidly.
+
+"Have you quarrelled with our new friend, Harry?" said my wife, as I
+came up to her.
+
+She was sitting on a stone. Turner and Wynnie were farther off towards
+the foot of the fall.
+
+"Not in the least," I answered, slightly outraged--I did not at first
+know why--by the question. "He is only gone to his work, which is a
+duty belonging both to the first and second tables of the law."
+
+"I hope you have asked him to come home to our early dinner, then," she
+rejoined.
+
+"I have not. That remains for you to do. Come, I will take you to him."
+
+Ethelwyn rose at once, put her hand in mine, and with a little help
+soon reached the table-rock. When Percivale saw that she was really on
+a visit to him on his island-perch, he rose, and when she came near
+enough, held out his hand. It was but a step, and she was beside him in
+a moment. After the usual greetings, which on her part, although very
+quiet, like every motion and word of hers, were yet indubitably cordial
+and kind, she said, "When you get back to London, Mr. Percivale, might
+I ask you to allow some friends of mine to call at your studio, and see
+your paintings?"
+
+"With all my heart," answered Percivale. "I must warn you, however,
+that I have not much they will care to see. They will perhaps go away
+less happy than they entered. Not many people care to see my pictures
+twice."
+
+"I would not send you anyone I thought unworthy of the honour,"
+answered my wife.
+
+Percivale bowed--one of his stately, old-world bows, which I greatly
+liked.
+
+"Any friend of yours--that is guarantee sufficient," he answered.
+
+There was this peculiarity about any compliment that Percivale paid,
+that you had not a doubt of its being genuine.
+
+"Will you come and take an early dinner with us?" said my wife. "My
+invalid daughter will be very pleased to see you."
+
+"I will with pleasure," he answered, but in a tone of some hesitation,
+as he glanced from Ethelwyn to me.
+
+"My wife speaks for us all," I said. "It will give us all pleasure."
+
+"I am only afraid it will break in upon your morning's work," remarked
+Ethelwyn.
+
+"O, that is not of the least consequence," he rejoined. "In fact, as I
+have just been saying to Mr. Walton, I am not working at all at
+present. This is pure recreation."
+
+As he spoke he turned towards his easel, and began hastily to bundle up
+his things.
+
+"We're not quite ready to go yet," said my wife, loath to leave the
+lovely spot. "What a curious flat stone this is!" she added.
+
+"It is," said Percivale. "The man to whom the place belongs, a worthy
+yeoman of the old school, says that this wider part of the channel must
+have been the fish-pond, and that the portly monks stood on this stone
+and fished in the pond."
+
+"Then was there a monastery here?" I asked.
+
+"Certainly. The ruins of the chapel, one of the smallest, are on the
+top, just above the fall--rather a fearful place to look down from. I
+wonder you did not observe them as you came. They say it had a silver
+bell in the days of its glory, which now lies in a deep hole under the
+basin, half-way between the top and bottom of the fall. But the old man
+says that nothing will make him look, or let anyone else lift the huge
+stone; for he is much better pleased to believe that it may be there,
+than he would be to know it was not there; for certainly, if it were
+found, it would not be left there long."
+
+As he spoke Percivale had continued packing his gear. He now led our
+party up to the chapel, and thence down a few yards to the edge of the
+chasm, where the water fell headlong. I turned away with that fear of
+high places which is one of my many weaknesses; and when I turned again
+towards the spot, there was Wynnie on the very edge, looking over into
+the flash and tumult of the water below, but with a nervous grasp of
+the hand of Percivale, who stood a little farther back.
+
+In going home, the painter led us by an easier way out of the valley,
+left his little easel and other things at a cottage, and then walked on
+in front between my wife and daughter, while Turner and I followed. He
+seemed quite at his ease with them, and plenty of talk and laughter
+rose on the way. I, however, was chiefly occupied with finding out
+Turner's impression of Connie's condition.
+
+"She is certainly better," he said. "I wonder you do not see it as
+plainly as I do. The pain is nearly gone from her spine, and she can
+move herself a good deal more, I am certain, than she could when she
+left. She asked me yesterday if she might not turn upon one side. 'Do
+you think you could?' I asked.--'I think so,' she answered. 'At any
+rate, I have often a great inclination to try; only papa said I had
+better wait till you came.' I do think she might be allowed a little
+more change of posture now."
+
+"Then you have really some hope of her final recovery?"
+
+"I have _hope_ most certainly. But what is hope in me, you must not
+allow to become certainty in you. I am nearly sure, though, that she
+can never be other than an invalid; that is, if I am to judge by what I
+know of such cases."
+
+"I am thankful for the hope," I answered. "You need not be afraid of my
+turning upon you, should the hope never pass into sight. I should do so
+only if I found that you had been treating me irrationally--inspiring
+me with hope which you knew to be false. The element of uncertainty is
+essential to hope, and for all true hope, even as hope, man has to be
+unspeakably thankful."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE WALK TO CHURCH.
+
+
+I was glad to be able to arrange with a young clergyman who was on a
+visit to Kilkhaven, that he should take my duty for me the next Sunday,
+for that was the only one Turner could spend with us. He and I and
+Wynnie walked together two miles to church. It was a lovely morning,
+with just a tint of autumn in the air. But even that tint, though all
+else was of the summer, brought a shadow, I could see, on Wynnie's face.
+
+"You said you would show me a poem of--Vaughan, I think you said, was
+the name of the writer. I am too ignorant of our older literature,"
+said Turner.
+
+"I have only just made acquaintance with him," I answered. "But I think
+I can repeat the poem. You shall judge whether it is not like
+Wordsworth's Ode.
+
+  'Happy those early days, when I
+  Shined in my angel infancy;
+  Before I understood the place
+  Appointed for my second race,
+  Or taught my soul to fancy ought
+  But a white, celestial thought;
+  When yet I had not walked above
+  A mile or two from my first love,
+  And looking back, at that short space,
+  Could see a glimpse of his bright face;
+  When on some gilded cloud or flower
+  My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
+  And in those weaker glories spy
+  Some shadows of eternity;
+  Before I taught my tongue to wound
+  My conscience with a sinful sound,
+  But felt through all this fleshly dress
+  Bright shoots of everlastingness.
+  O how I long to travel back----'"
+
+But here I broke down, for I could not remember the rest with even
+approximate accuracy.
+
+"When did this Vaughan live?" asked Turner.
+
+"He was born, I find, in 1621--five years, that is, after Shakspere's
+death, and when Milton was about thirteen years old. He lived to the
+age of seventy-three, but seems to have been little known. In politics
+he was on the Cavalier side. By the way, he was a medical man, like
+you, Turner--an M.D. We'll have a glance at the little book when we go
+back. Don't let me forget to show it you. A good many of your
+profession have distinguished themselves in literature, and as profound
+believers too."
+
+"I should have thought the profession had been chiefly remarkable for
+such as believe only in the evidence of the senses."
+
+"As if having searched into the innermost recesses of the body, and not
+having found a soul, they considered themselves justified in declaring
+there was none."
+
+"Just so."
+
+"Well, that is true of the commonplace amongst them, I do believe. You
+will find the exceptions have been men of fine minds and
+characters--not such as he of whom Chaucer says,
+
+  'His study was but little on the Bible;'
+
+for if you look at the rest of the description of the man, you will
+find that he was in alliance with his apothecary for their mutual
+advantage, that he was a money-loving man, and that some of Chaucer's
+keenest irony is spent on him in an off-hand, quiet manner. Compare the
+tone in which he writes of the doctor of physic, with the profound
+reverence wherewith he bows himself before the poor country-parson."
+
+Here Wynnie spoke, though with some tremor in her voice.
+
+"I never know, papa, what people mean by talking about childhood in
+that way. I never seem to have been a bit younger and more innocent
+than I am."
+
+"Don't you remember a time, Wynnie, when the things about you--the sky
+and the earth, say--seemed to you much grander than they seem now? You
+are old enough to have lost something."
+
+She thought for a little while before she answered.
+
+"My dreams were, I know. I cannot say so of anything else."
+
+I in my turn had to be silent, for I did not see the true answer,
+though I was sure there was one somewhere, if I could only find it. All
+I could reply, however, even after I had meditated a good while,
+was--and perhaps, after all, it was the best thing I could have said:
+
+"Then you must make a good use of your dreams, my child."
+
+"Why, papa?"
+
+"Because they are the only memorials of childhood you have left."
+
+"How am I to make a good use of them? I don't know what to do with my
+silly old dreams."
+
+But she gave a sigh as she spoke that testified her silly old dreams
+had a charm for her still.
+
+"If your dreams, my child, have ever testified to you of a condition of
+things beyond that which you see around you, if they have been to you
+the hints of a wonder and glory beyond what visits you now, you must
+not call them silly, for they are just what the scents of Paradise
+borne on the air were to Adam and Eve as they delved and spun,
+reminding them that they must aspire yet again through labour into that
+childhood of obedience which is the only paradise of humanity--into
+that oneness with the will of the Father, which our race, our
+individual selves, need just as much as if we had personally fallen
+with Adam, and from which we fall every time we are disobedient to the
+voice of the Father within our souls--to the conscience which is his
+making and his witness. If you have had no childhood, my Wynnie, yet
+permit your old father to say that everything I see in you indicates
+more strongly in you than in most people that it is this childhood
+after which you are blindly longing, without which you find that life
+is hardly to be endured. Thank God for your dreams, my child. In him
+you will find that the essence of those dreams is fulfilled. We are
+saved by hope, Turner. Never man hoped too much, or repented that he
+had hoped. The plague is that we don't hope in God half enough. The
+very fact that hope is strength, and strength the outcome, the body of
+life, shows that hope is at one with life, with the very essence of
+what says 'I am'--yea, of what doubts and says 'Am I?' and therefore is
+reasonable to creatures who cannot even doubt save in that they live."
+
+By this time, for I have, of course, only given the outlines, or rather
+salient points, of our conversation, we had reached the church, where,
+if I found the sermon neither healing nor inspiring, I found the
+prayers full of hope and consolation. They at least are safe beyond
+human caprice, conceit, or incapacity. Upon them, too, the man who is
+distressed at the thought of how little of the needful food he had been
+able to provide for his people, may fall back for comfort, in the
+thought that there at least was what ought to have done them good, what
+it was well worth their while to go to church for. But I did think they
+were too long for any individual Christian soul, to sympathise with
+from beginning to end, that is, to respond to, like organ-tube to the
+fingered key, in every touch of the utterance of the general Christian
+soul. For my reader must remember that it is one thing to read prayers
+and another to respond; and that I had had very few opportunities of
+being in the position of the latter duty. I had had suspicions before,
+and now they were confirmed--that the present crowding of services was
+most inexpedient. And as I pondered on the matter, instead of trying to
+go on praying after I had already uttered my soul, which is but a
+heathenish attempt after much speaking, I thought how our Lord had
+given us such a short prayer to pray, and I began to wonder when or how
+the services came to be so heaped the one on the back of the other as
+they now were. No doubt many people defended them; no doubt many people
+could sit them out; but how many people could pray from beginning to
+end of them I On this point we had some talk as we went home. Wynnie
+was opposed to any change of the present use on the ground that we
+should only have the longer sermons.
+
+"Still," I said, "I do not think even that so great an evil. A
+sensitive conscience will not reproach itself so much for not listening
+to the whole of a sermon, as for kneeling in prayer and not praying. I
+think myself, however, that after the prayers are over, everyone should
+be at liberty to go out and leave the sermon unheard, if he pleases. I
+think the result would be in the end a good one both for parson and
+people. It would break through the deadness of this custom, this use
+and wont. Many a young mind is turned for life against the influences
+of church-going--one of the most sacred influences when _pure_, that
+is, un-mingled with non-essentials--just by the feeling that he _must_
+do so and so, that he must go through a certain round of duty. It is a
+willing service that the Lord wants; no forced devotions are either
+acceptable to him, or other than injurious to the worshipper, if such
+he can be called."
+
+After an early dinner, I said to Turner--"Come out with me, and we will
+read that poem of Vaughan's in which I broke down today."
+
+"O, papa!" said Connie, in a tone of injury, from the sofa.
+
+"What is it, my dear?" I asked.
+
+"Wouldn't it be as good for us as for Mr. Turner?"
+
+"Quite, my dear. Well, I will keep it for the evening, and meantime Mr.
+Turner and I will go and see if we can find out anything about the
+change in the church-service."
+
+For I had thrown into my bag as I left the rectory a copy of _The
+Clergyman's Vade Mecum_--a treatise occupied with the externals of the
+churchman's relations--in which I soon came upon the following passage:
+
+"So then it appears that the common practice of reading all three
+together, is an innovation, and if an ancient or infirm clergyman do
+read them at two or three several times, he is more strictly
+conformable; however, this is much better than to omit any part of the
+liturgy, or to read all three offices into one, as is now commonly
+done, without any pause or distinction."
+
+"On the part of the clergyman, you see, Turner," I said, when I had
+finished reading the whole passage to him. "There is no care taken of
+the delicate women of the congregation, but only of the ancient or
+infirm clergyman. And the logic, to say the least, is rather queer: is
+it only in virtue of his antiquity and infirmity that he is to be
+upheld in being more strictly conformable? The writer's honesty has its
+heels trodden upon by the fear of giving offence. Nevertheless there
+should perhaps be a certain slowness to admit change, even back to a
+more ancient form."
+
+"I don't know that I can quite agree with you there," said Turner. "If
+the form is better, no one should hesitate to advocate the change. If
+it is worse, then slowness is not sufficient--utter obstinacy is the
+right condition."
+
+"You are right, Turner. For the right must be the rule, and where _the
+right_ is beyond our understanding or our reach, then _the better_, as
+indeed not only right compared with the other, but the sole ascent
+towards the right."
+
+In the evening I took Henry Vaughan's poems into the common
+sitting-room, and to Connie's great delight read the whole of the
+lovely, though unequal little poem, called "The Retreat," in recalling
+which I had failed in the morning. She was especially delighted with
+the "white celestial thought," and the "bright shoots of
+everlastingness." Then I gave a few lines from another yet more unequal
+poem, worthy in themselves of the best of the other. I quote the first
+strophe entire:
+
+  CHILDHOOD.
+
+  "I cannot reach it; and my striving eye
+  Dazzles at it, as at eternity.
+  Were now that chronicle alive,
+  Those white designs which children drive,
+  And the thoughts of each harmless hour,
+  With their content too in my power,
+  Quickly would I make my path even,
+  And by mere playing go to heaven.
+
+  *     *     *     *     *
+
+  And yet the practice worldlings call
+  Business and weighty action all,
+  Checking the poor child for his play,
+  But gravely cast themselves away.
+
+  *     *     *     *     *
+
+  An age of mysteries! which he
+  Must live twice that would God's face see;
+  Which angels guard, and with it play,
+  Angels! which foul men drive away.
+  How do I study now, and scan
+  Thee more than ere I studied man,
+  And only see through a long night
+  Thy edges and thy bordering light I
+  O for thy centre and midday!
+  For sure that is the _narrow way!_"
+
+"For of such is the kingdom of heaven." said my wife softly, as I
+closed the book.
+
+"May I have the book, papa?" said Connie, holding out her thin white
+cloud of a hand to take it.
+
+"Certainly, my child. And if Wynnie would read it with you, she will
+feel more of the truth of what Mr. Percivale was saying to her about
+finish. Here are the finest, grandest thoughts, set forth sometimes
+with such carelessness, at least such lack of neatness, that, instead
+of their falling on the mind with all their power of loveliness, they
+are like a beautiful face disfigured with patches, and, what is worse,
+they put the mind out of the right, quiet, unquestioning, open mood,
+which is the only fit one for the reception of such true things as are
+embodied in the poems. But they are too beautiful after all to be more
+than a little spoiled by such a lack of the finish with which Art ends
+off all her labours. A gentleman, however, thinks it of no little
+importance to have his nails nice as well as his face and his shirt."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE OLD CASTLE.
+
+
+The place Turner had chosen suited us all so well, that after attending
+to my duties on the two following Sundays at Kilkhaven, I returned on
+the Monday or Tuesday to the farmhouse. But Turner left us in the
+middle of the second week, for he could not be longer absent from his
+charge at home, and we missed him much. It was some days before Connie
+was quite as cheerful again as usual. I do not mean that she was in the
+least gloomy--that she never was; she was only a little less merry. But
+whether it was that Turner had opened our eyes, or that she had visibly
+improved since he allowed her to make a little change in her
+posture--certainly she appeared to us to have made considerable
+progress, and every now and then we were discovering some little proof
+of the fact. One evening, while we were still at the farm, she startled
+us by calling out suddenly,--
+
+"Papa, papa! I moved my big toe! I did indeed."
+
+We were all about her in a moment. But I saw that she was excited, and
+fearing a reaction I sought to calm her.
+
+"But, my dear," I said, as quietly as I could, "you are probably still
+aware that you are possessed of two big toes: which of them are we to
+congratulate on this first stride in the march of improvement?"
+
+She broke out in the merriest laugh. A pause followed in which her face
+wore a puzzled expression. Then she said all at once, "Papa, it is very
+odd, but I can't tell which of them," and burst into tears. I was
+afraid that I had done more harm than good.
+
+"It is not of the slightest consequence, my child," I said. "You have
+had so little communication with the twins of late, that it is no
+wonder you should not be able to tell the one from the other."
+
+She smiled again through her sobs, but was silent, with shining face,
+for the rest of the evening. Our hopes took a fresh start, but we heard
+no more from her of her power over her big toe. As often as I inquired
+she said she was afraid she had made a mistake, for she had not had
+another hint of its existence. Still I thought it could not have been a
+fancy, and I would cleave to my belief in the good sign.
+
+Percivale called to see us several times, but always appeared anxious
+not to intrude more of his society upon us than might be agreeable. He
+grew in my regard, however; and at length I asked him if he would
+assist me in another surprise which I meditated for my companions, and
+this time for Connie as well, and which I hoped would prevent the
+painful influences of the sight of the sea from returning upon them
+when they went back to Kilkhaven: they must see the sea from a quite
+different shore first. In a word I would take them to Tintagel, of the
+near position of which they were not aware, although in some of our
+walks we had seen the ocean in the distance. An early day was fixed for
+carrying out our project, and I proceeded to get everything ready. The
+only difficulty was to find a carriage in the neighbourhood suitable
+for receiving Connie's litter. In this, however, I at length succeeded,
+and on the morning of a glorious day of blue and gold, we set out for
+the little village of Trevenna, now far better known than at the time
+of which I write. Connie had been out every day since she came, now in
+one part of the fields, now in another, enjoying the expanse of earth
+and sky, but she had had no drive, and consequently had seen no variety
+of scenery. Therefore, believing she was now thoroughly able to bear
+it, I quite reckoned of the good she would get from the inevitable
+excitement. We resolved, however, after finding how much she enjoyed
+the few miles' drive, that we would not demand more, of her strength
+that day, and therefore put up at the little inn, where, after ordering
+dinner, Percivale and I left the ladies, and sallied forth to
+reconnoitre.
+
+We walked through the village and down the valley beyond, sloping
+steeply between hills towards the sea, the opening closed at the end by
+the blue of the ocean below and the more ethereal blue of the sky
+above. But when we reached the mouth of the valley we found that we
+were not yet on the shore, for a precipice lay between us and the
+little beach below. On the left a great peninsula of rock stood out
+into the sea, upon which rose the ruins of the keep of Tintagel, while
+behind on the mainland stood the ruins of the castle itself, connected
+with the other only by a narrow isthmus. We had read that this
+peninsula had once been an island, and that the two parts of the castle
+were formerly connected by a drawbridge. Looking up at the great gap
+which now divided the two portions, it seemed at first impossible to
+believe that they had ever been thus united; but a little reflection
+cleared up the mystery.
+
+The fact was that the isthmus, of half the height of the two parts
+connected by it, had been formed entirely by the fall of portions of
+the rock and soil on each side into the narrow dividing space, through
+which the waters of the Atlantic had been wont to sweep. And now the
+fragments of walls stood on the very verge of the precipice, and showed
+that large portions of the castle itself had fallen into the gulf
+between. We turned to the left along the edge of the rock, and so by a
+narrow path reached and crossed to the other side of the isthmus. We
+then found that the path led to the foot of the rock, formerly island,
+of the keep, and thence in a zigzag up the face of it to the top. We
+followed it, and after a great climb reached a door in a modern
+battlement. Entering, we found ourselves amidst grass, and ruins
+haggard with age. We turned and surveyed the path by which we had come.
+It was steep and somewhat difficult. But the outlook was glorious. It
+was indeed one of God's mounts of vision upon which we stood. The
+thought, "O that Connie could see this!" was swelling in my heart, when
+Percivale broke the silence--not with any remark on the glory around
+us, but with the commonplace question--
+
+"You haven't got your man with you, I think, Mr. Walton?"
+
+"No," I answered; "we thought it better to leave him to look after the
+boys."
+
+He was silent for a few minutes, while I gazed in delight.
+
+"Don't you think," he said, "it would be possible to bring Miss
+Constance up here?"
+
+I almost started at the idea, and had not replied before he resumed:
+
+"It would be something for her to recur to with delight all the rest of
+her life."
+
+"It would indeed. But it is impossible."
+
+"I do not think so--if you would allow me the honour to assist you. I
+think we could do it perfectly between us."
+
+I was again silent for a while. Looking down on the way we had come, it
+seemed an almost dreadful undertaking. Percivale spoke again.
+
+"As we shall come here to-morrow, we need not explore the place now.
+Shall we go down at once and observe the whole path, with a view to the
+practicability of carrying her up?"
+
+"There can be no objection to that," I answered, as a little hope, and
+courage with it, began to dawn in my heart. "But you must allow it does
+not look very practicable."
+
+"Perhaps it would seem more so to you, if you had come up with the idea
+in your head all the way, as I did. Any path seems more difficult in
+looking back than at the time when the difficulties themselves have to
+be met and overcome."
+
+"Yes, but then you must remember that we have to take the way back
+whether we will or no, if we once take the way forward."
+
+"True; and now I will go down with the descent in my head as well as
+under my feet."
+
+"Well, there can be no harm in reconnoitring it at least. Let us go."
+
+"You know we can rest almost as often as we please," said Percivale,
+and turned to lead the way.
+
+It certainly was steep, and required care even in our own descent; but
+for a man who had climbed mountains, as I had done in my youth, it
+could hardly be called difficult even in middle age. By the time we had
+got again into the valley road I was all but convinced of the
+practicability of the proposal. I was a little vexed, however, I must
+confess, that a stranger should have thought of giving such a pleasure
+to Connie, when the bare wish that she might have enjoyed it had alone
+arisen in my mind. I comforted myself with the reflection that this was
+one of the ways in which we were to be weaned from the world and knit
+the faster to our fellows. For even the middle-aged, in the decay of
+their daring, must look for the fresh thought and the fresh impulse to
+the youth which follows at their heels in the march of life. Their part
+is to _will_ the relation and the obligation, and so, by love to and
+faith in the young, keep themselves in the line along which the
+electric current flows, till at length they too shall once more be
+young and daring in the strength of the Lord. A man must always seek to
+rise above his moods and feelings, to let them move within him, but not
+allow them to storm or gloom around him. By the time we reached home we
+had agreed to make the attempt, and to judge by the path to the foot of
+the rock, which was difficult in parts, whether we should be likely to
+succeed, without danger, in attempting the rest of the way and the
+following descent. As soon as we had arrived at this conclusion, I felt
+so happy in the prospect that I grew quite merry, especially after we
+had further agreed that, both for the sake of her nerves and for the
+sake of the lordly surprise, we should bind Connie's eyes so that she
+should see nothing till we had placed her in a certain position,
+concerning the preferableness of which we were not of two minds.
+
+"What mischief have you two been about?" said my wife, as we entered
+our room in the inn, where the cloth was already laid for dinner. "You
+look just like two schoolboys that have been laying some plot, and can
+hardly hold their tongues about it."
+
+"We have been enjoying our little walk amazingly," I answered. "So much
+so, that we mean to set out for another the moment dinner is over."
+
+"I hope you will take Wynnie with you then."
+
+"Or you, my love," I returned.
+
+"No; I will stay with Connie."
+
+"Very well. You, and Connie too, shall go out to-morrow, for we have
+found a place we want to take you to. And, indeed, I believe it was our
+anticipation of the pleasure you and she would have in the view that
+made us so merry when you accused us of plotting mischief."
+
+My wife replied only with a loving look, and dinner appearing at this
+moment, we sat down a happy party.
+
+When that was over--and a very good dinner it was, just what I like,
+homely in material but admirable in cooking--Wynnie and Percivale and I
+set out again. For as Percivale and I came back in the morning we had
+seen the church standing far aloft and aloof on the other side of the
+little valley, and we wanted to go to it. It was rather a steep climb,
+and Wynnie accepted Percivale's offered arm. I led the way, therefore,
+and left them to follow--not so far in the rear, however, but that I
+could take a share in the conversation. It was some little time before
+any arose, and it was Wynnie who led the way into it.
+
+"What kind of things do you like best to paint, Mr. Percivale?" she
+asked.
+
+He hesitated for several seconds, which between a question and an
+answer look so long, that most people would call them minutes.
+
+"I would rather you should see some of my pictures--I should prefer
+that to answering your question," he said, at length.
+
+"But I have seen some of your pictures," she returned.
+
+"Pardon me. Indeed you have not, Miss Walton."
+
+"At least I have seen some of your sketches and studies."
+
+"Some of my sketches--none of my studies."
+
+"But you make use of your sketches for your pictures, do you not?"
+
+"Never of such as you have seen. They are only a slight antidote to my
+pictures."
+
+"I cannot understand you."
+
+"I do not wonder at that. But I would rather, I repeat, say nothing
+about my pictures till you see some of them."
+
+"But how am I to have that pleasure, then?"
+
+"You go to London sometimes, do you not?"
+
+"Very rarely. More rarely still when the Royal Academy is open."
+
+"That does not matter much. My pictures are seldom to be found there."
+
+"Do you not care to send them there?"
+
+"I send one, at least, every year. But they are rarely accepted."
+
+"Why?"
+
+This was a very improper question, I thought; but if Wynnie had thought
+so she would not have put it. He hesitated a little before he replied--
+
+"It is hardly for me to say why," he answered; "but I cannot wonder
+much at it, considering the subjects I choose.--But I daresay," he
+added, in a lighter tone, "after all, that has little to do with it,
+and there is something about the things themselves that precludes a
+favourable judgment. I avoid thinking about it. A man ought to try to
+look at his own work as if it were none of his, but not as with the
+eyes of other people. That is an impossibility, and the attempt a
+bewilderment. It is with his own eyes he must look, with his own
+judgment he must judge. The only effort is to get it set far away
+enough from him to be able to use his own eyes and his own judgment
+upon it."
+
+"I think I see what you mean. A man has but his own eyes and his own
+judgment. To look with those of other people is but a fancy."
+
+"Quite so. You understand me quite."
+
+He said no more in explanation of his rejection by the Academy. Till we
+reached the church, nothing more of significance passed between them.
+
+What a waste, bare churchyard that was! It had two or three lych-gates,
+but they had no roofs. They were just small enclosures, with the low
+stone tables, to rest the living from the weight of the dead, while the
+clergyman, as the keeper of heaven's wardrobe, came forth to receive
+the garment they restored--to be laid aside as having ended its work,
+as having been worn done in the winds, and rains, and labours of the
+world. Not a tree stood in that churchyard. Hank grass was the sole
+covering of the soil heaved up with the dead beneath. What blasts from
+the awful space of the sea must rush athwart the undefended garden! The
+ancient church stood in the midst, with its low, strong, square tower,
+and its long, narrow nave, the ridge bowed with age, like the back of a
+horse worn out in the service of man, and its little homely chancel,
+like a small cottage that had leaned up against its end for shelter
+from the western blasts. It was locked, and we could not enter. But of
+all world-worn, sad-looking churches, that one--sad, even in the
+sunset--was the dreariest I had ever beheld. Surely, it needed the
+gospel of the resurrection fervently preached therein, to keep it from
+sinking to the dust with dismay and weariness. Such a soul alone could
+keep it from vanishing utterly of dismal old age. Near it was one huge
+mound of grass-grown rubbish, looking like the grave where some former
+church of the dead had been buried, when it could stand erect no longer
+before the onsets of Atlantic winds. I walked round and round it,
+gathering its architecture, and peeping in at every window I could
+reach. Suddenly I was aware that I was alone. Returning to the other
+side, I found that Percivale was seated on the churchyard wall, next
+the sea--it would have been less dismal had it stood immediately on the
+cliffs, but they were at some little distance beyond bare downs and
+rough stone walls; he was sketching the place, and Wynnie stood beside
+him, looking over his shoulder. I did not interrupt him, but walked
+among the graves, reading the poor memorials of the dead, and wondering
+how many of the words of laudation that were inscribed on their tombs
+were spoken of them while they were yet alive. Yet, surely, in the
+lives of those to whom they applied the least, there had been moments
+when the true nature, the nature God had given them, broke forth in
+faith and tenderness, and would have justified the words inscribed on
+their gravestones! I was yet wandering and reading, and stumbling over
+the mounds, when my companions joined me, and, without a word, we
+walked out of the churchyard. We were nearly home before one of us
+spoke.
+
+"That church is oppressive," said Percivale. "It looks like a great
+sepulchre, a place built only for the dead--the church of the dead."
+
+"It is only that it partakes with the living," I returned; "suffers
+with them the buffetings of life, outlasts them, but shows, like the
+shield of the Red-Cross Knight, the 'old dints of deep wounds.'"
+
+"Still, is it not a dreary place to choose for a church to stand in?"
+
+"The church must stand everywhere. There is no region into which it
+must not, ought not to enter. If it refuses any earthly spot, it is
+shrinking from its calling. Here this one stands for the sea as for the
+land, high-uplifted, looking out over the waters as a sign of the haven
+from all storms, the rest in God. And down beneath in its storehouse
+lie the bodies of men--you saw the grave of some of them on the other
+side--flung ashore from the gulfing sea. It may be a weakness, but one
+would rather have the bones of his friend laid in the still Sabbath of
+the churchyard earth, than sweeping and swaying about as Milton
+imagines the bones of his friend Edward King, in that wonderful
+'Lycidas.'" Then I told them the conversation I had had with the sexton
+at Kilkhaven. "But," I went on, "these fancies are only the ghostly
+mists that hang about the eastern hills before the sun rises. We shall
+look down on all that with a smile by and by; for the Lord tells us
+that if we believe in him we shall never die."
+
+By this time we were back once more at the inn. We gave Connie a
+description of what we had seen.
+
+"What a brave old church!" said Connie.
+
+The next day I awoke very early, full of the anticipated attempt. I got
+up at once, found the weather most promising, and proceeded first of
+all to have a look at Connie's litter, and see that it was quite sound.
+Satisfied of this, I rejoiced in the contemplation of its lightness and
+strength.
+
+After breakfast I went to Connie's room, and told her that Mr.
+Percivale and I had devised a treat for her. Her face shone at once.
+
+"But we want to do it our own way."
+
+"Of course, papa," she answered.
+
+"Will you let us tie your eyes up?"
+
+"Yes; and my ears and my hands too. It would be no good tying my feet,
+when I don't know one big toe from the other."
+
+And she laughed merrily.
+
+"We'll try to keep up the talk all the way, so that you sha'n't weary
+of the journey."
+
+"You're going to carry me somewhere with my eyes tied up. O! how jolly!
+And then I shall see something all at once! Jolly! jolly!--Getting
+tired!" she repeated. "Even the wind on my face would be pleasure
+enough for half a day. I sha'n't get tired so soon as you will--you
+dear, kind papa! I am afraid I shall be dreadfully heavy. But I sha'n't
+jerk your arms much. I will lie so still!"
+
+"And you won't mind letting Mr. Percivale help me to carry you?"
+
+"No. Why should I, if he doesn't mind it? He looks strong enough; and I
+am sure he is nice, and won't think me heavier than I am."
+
+"Very well, then. I will send mamma and Wynnie to dress you at once;
+and we shall set out as soon as you are ready."
+
+She clapped her hands with delight, then caught me round the neck and
+gave me one of my own kisses as she called the best she had, and began
+to call as loud as she could on her mamma and Wynnie to come and dress
+her.
+
+It was indeed a glorious morning. The wind came in little wafts, like
+veins of cool white silver amid the great, warm, yellow gold of the
+sunshine. The sea lay before us a mound of blue closing up the end of
+the valley, as if overpowered into quietness by the lordliness of the
+sun overhead; and the hills between which we went lay like great sheep,
+with green wool, basking in the blissful heat. The gleam from the
+waters came up the pass; the grand castle crowned the left-hand steep,
+seeming to warm its old bones, like the ruins of some awful megatherium
+in the lighted air; one white sail sped like a glad thought across the
+spandrel of the sea; the shadows of the rocks lay over our path, like
+transient, cool, benignant deaths, through which we had to pass again
+and again to yet higher glory beyond; and one lark was somewhere in
+whose little breast the whole world was reflected as in the convex
+mirror of a dewdrop, where it swelled so that he could not hold it, but
+let it out again through his throat, metamorphosed into music, which he
+poured forth over all as the libation on the outspread altar of worship.
+
+And of all this we talked to Connie as we went; and every now and then
+she would clap her hands gently in the fulness of her delight, although
+she beheld the splendour only as with her ears, or from the kisses of
+the wind on her cheeks. But she seemed, since her accident, to have
+approached that condition which Milton represents Samson as longing for
+in his blindness, wherein the sight should be
+
+  "through all parts diffused,
+  That she might look at will through every pore."
+
+I had, however, arranged with the rest of the company, that the moment
+we reached the cliff over the shore, and turned to the left to cross
+the isthmus, the conversation should no longer be about the things
+around us; and especially I warned my wife and Wynnie that no
+exclamation of surprise or delight should break from them before
+Connie's eyes were uncovered. I had said nothing to either of them
+about the difficulties of the way, that, seeing us take them as
+ordinary things, they might take them so too, and not be uneasy.
+
+We never stopped till we reached the foot of the peninsula, _nee_
+island, upon which the keep of Tintagel stands. There we set Connie
+down, to take breath and ease our arms before we began the arduous way.
+
+"Now, now!" said Connie eagerly, lifting her hands in the belief that
+we were on the point of undoing the bandage from her eyes.
+
+"No, no, my love, not yet," I said, and she lay still again, only she
+looked more eager than before.
+
+"I am afraid I have tired out you and Mr. Percivale, papa," she said.
+
+Percivale laughed so amusedly, that she rejoined roguishly--
+
+"O yes! I know every gentleman is a Hercules--at least, he chooses to
+be considered one! But, notwithstanding my firm faith in the fact, I
+have a little womanly conscience left that is hard to hoodwink."
+
+There was a speech for my wee Connie to make! The best answer and the
+best revenge was to lift her and go on. This we did, trying as well as
+we might to prevent the difference of level between us from tilting the
+litter too much for her comfort.
+
+"Where _are_ you going, papa?" she said once, but without a sign of
+fear in her voice, as a little slip I made lowered my end of the litter
+suddenly. "You must be going up a steep place. Don't hurt yourself,
+dear papa."
+
+We had changed our positions, and were now carrying her, head foremost,
+up the hill. Percivale led, and I followed. Now I could see every
+change on her lovely face, and it made me strong to endure; for I did
+find it hard work, I confess, to get to the top. It lay like a little
+sunny pool, on which all the cloudy thoughts that moved in some unseen
+heaven cast exquisitely delicate changes of light and shade as they
+floated over it. Percivale strode on as if he bore a feather behind
+him. I did wish we were at the top, for my arms began to feel like
+iron-cables, stiff and stark--only I was afraid of my fingers giving
+way. My heart was beating uncomfortably too. But Percivale, I felt
+almost inclined to quarrel with him before it was over, he strode on so
+unconcernedly, turning every corner of the zigzag where I expected him
+to propose a halt, and striding on again, as if there could be no
+pretence for any change of procedure. But I held out, strengthened by
+the play on my daughter's face, delicate as the play on an opal--one
+that inclines more to the milk than the fire.
+
+When at length we turned in through the gothic door in the battlemented
+wall, and set our lovely burden down upon the grass--
+
+"Percivale," I said, forgetting the proprieties in the affected humour
+of being angry with him, so glad was I that we had her at length on the
+mount of glory, "why did you go on walking like a castle, and pay no
+heed to me?"
+
+"You didn't speak, did you, Mr. Walton," he returned, with just a
+shadow of solicitude in the question.
+
+"No. Of course not," I rejoined.
+
+"O, then," he returned, in a tone of relief, "how could I? You were my
+captain: how could I give in so long as you were holding on?"
+
+I am afraid the _Percivale_, without the _Mister_, came again and again
+after this, though I pulled myself up for it as often as I caught
+myself.
+
+"Now, papa!" said Connie from the grass.
+
+"Not yet, my dear. Wait till your mamma and Wynnie come. Let us go and
+meet them, Mr. Percivale."
+
+"O yes, do, papa. Leave me alone here without knowing where I am or
+what kind of a place I am in. I should like to know how it feels. I
+have never been alone in all my life."
+
+"Very well, my dear," I said; and Percivale and I left her alone in the
+ruins.
+
+We found Ethelwyn toiling up with Wynnie helping her all she could.
+
+"Dear Harry," she said, "how could you think of bringing Connie up such
+an awful place? I wonder you dared to do it."
+
+"It's done you see, wife," I answered, "thanks to Mr. Percivale, who
+has nearly torn the breath out of me. But now we must get you up, and
+you will say that to see Connie's delight, not to mention your own, is
+quite wages for the labour."
+
+"Isn't she afraid to find herself so high up?"
+
+"She knows nothing about it yet."
+
+"You do not mean you have left the child there with her eyes tied up."
+
+"To be sure. We could not uncover them before you came. It would spoil
+half the pleasure."
+
+"Do let us make haste then. It is surely dangerous to leave her so."
+
+"Not in the least; but she must be getting tired of the darkness. Take
+my arm now."
+
+"Don't you think Mrs. Walton had better take my arm," said Percivale,
+"and then you can put your hand on her back, and help her a little that
+way."
+
+We tried the plan, found it a good one, and soon reached the top. The
+moment our eyes fell upon Connie, we could see that she had found the
+place neither fearful nor lonely. The sweetest ghost of a smile hovered
+on her pale face, which shone in the shadow of the old gateway of the
+keep, with light from within her own sunny soul. She lay in such still
+expectation, that you would have thought she had just fallen asleep
+after receiving an answer to a prayer, reminding me of a little-known
+sonnet of Wordsworth's, in which he describes as the type of Death--
+
+  "the face of one
+  Sleeping alone within a mossy cave
+  With her face up to heaven; that seemed to have
+  Pleasing remembrance of a thought foregone;
+  A lovely beauty in a summer grave."
+
+[Footnote: _Miscellaneous Sonnets_, part i.28.]
+
+But she heard our steps, and her face awoke.
+
+"Is mamma come?"
+
+"Yes, my darling. I am here," said her mother. "How do you feel?"
+
+"Perfectly well, mamma, thank you. Now, papa!"
+
+"One moment more, my love. Now, Percivale."
+
+We carried her to the spot we had agreed upon, and while we held her a
+little inclined that she might see the better, her mother undid the
+bandage from her head.
+
+"Hold your hands over her eyes, a little way from them," I said to her
+as she untied the handkerchief, "that the light may reach them by
+degrees, and not blind her."
+
+Ethelwyn did so for a few moments, then removed them. Still for a
+moment or two more, it was plain from her look of utter bewilderment,
+that all was a confused mass of light and colour. Then she gave a
+little cry, and to my astonishment, almost fear, half rose to a sitting
+posture. One moment more and she laid herself gently back, and wept and
+sobbed.
+
+And now I may admit my reader to a share, though at best but a dim
+reflex in my poor words, of the glory that made her weep.
+
+Through the gothic-arched door in the battlemented wall, which stood on
+the very edge of the precipitous descent, so that nothing of the
+descent was seen, and the door was as a framework to the picture,
+Connie saw a great gulf at her feet, full to the brim of a splendour of
+light and colour. Before her rose the great ruins of rock and castle,
+the ruin of rock with castle; rough stone below, clear green happy
+grass above, even to the verge of the abrupt and awful precipice; over
+it the summer sky so clear that it must have been clarified by sorrow
+and thought; at the foot of the rocks, hundreds of feet below, the blue
+waters breaking in white upon the dark gray sands; all full of the
+gladness of the sun overflowing in speechless delight, and reflected in
+fresh gladness from stone and water and flower, like new springs of
+light rippling forth from the earth itself to swell the universal tide
+of glory--all this seen through the narrow gothic archway of a door in
+a wall--up--down--on either hand. But the main marvel was the look
+sheer below into the abyss full of light and air and colour, its sides
+lined with rock and grass, and its bottom lined with blue ripples and
+sand. Was it any wonder that my Connie should cry aloud when the vision
+dawned upon her, and then weep to ease a heart ready to burst with
+delight? "O Lord God," I said, almost involuntarily, "thou art very
+rich. Thou art the one poet, the one maker. We worship thee. Make but
+our souls as full of glory in thy sight as this chasm is to our eyes
+glorious with the forms which thou hast cloven and carved out of
+nothingness, and we shall be worthy to worship thee, O Lord, our God."
+For I was carried beyond myself with delight, and with sympathy with
+Connie's delight and with the calm worship of gladness in my wife's
+countenance. But when my eye fell on Wynnie, I saw a trouble mingled
+with her admiration, a self-accusation, I think, that she did not and
+could not enjoy it more; and when I turned from her, there were the
+eyes of Percivale fixed on me in wonderment; and for the moment I felt
+as David must have felt when, in his dance of undignified delight that
+he had got the ark home again, he saw the contemptuous eyes of Michal
+fixed on him from the window. But I could not leave it so. I said to
+him--coldly I daresay:
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Percivale; I forgot for the moment that I was not
+amongst my own family."
+
+Percivale took his hat off.
+
+"Forgive my seeming rudeness, Mr. Walton. I was half-envying and
+half-wondering. You would not be surprised at my unconscious behaviour
+if you had seen as much of the wrong side of the stuff as I have seen
+in London."
+
+I had some idea of what he meant; but this was no time to enter upon a
+discussion. I could only say--
+
+"My heart was full, Mr. Percivale, and I let it overflow."
+
+"Let me at least share in its overflow," he rejoined, and nothing more
+passed on the subject.
+
+For the next ten minutes we stood in absolute silence. We had set
+Connie down on the grass again, but propped up so that she could see
+through the doorway. And she lay in still ecstasy. But there was more
+to be seen ere we descended. There was the rest of the little islet
+with its crop of down-grass, on which the horses of all the knights of
+King Arthur's round table might have fed for a week--yes, for a
+fortnight, without, by any means, encountering the short commons of
+war. There were the ruins of the castle so built of plates of the
+laminated stone of the rocks on which they stood, and so woven in or
+more properly incorporated with the outstanding rocks themselves, that
+in some parts I found it impossible to tell which was building and
+which was rock--the walls themselves seeming like a growth out of the
+island itself, so perfectly were they in harmony with, and in kind the
+same as, the natural ground upon which and of which they had been
+constructed. And this would seem to me to be the perfection of
+architecture. The work of man's hands should be so in harmony with the
+place where it stands that it must look as if it had grown out of the
+soil. But the walls were in some parts so thin that one wondered how
+they could have stood so long. They must have been built before the
+time of any formidable artillery--enough only for defence from arrows.
+But then the island was nowhere commanded, and its own steep cliffs
+would be more easily defended than any erections upon it. Clearly the
+intention was that no enemy should thereon find rest for the sole of
+his foot; for if he was able to land, farewell to the notion of any
+further defence. Then there was outside the walls the little
+chapel--such a tiny chapel! of which little more than the foundation
+remained, with the ruins of the altar still standing, and outside the
+chancel, nestling by its wall, a coffin hollowed in the rock; then the
+churchyard a little way off full of graves, which, I presume, would
+have vanished long ago were it not that the very graves were founded on
+the rock. There still stood old worn-out headstones of thin slate, but
+no memorials were left. Then there was the fragment of arched passage
+underground laid open to the air in the centre of the islet; and last,
+and grandest of all, the awful edges of the rock, broken by time, and
+carved by the winds and the waters into grotesque shapes and
+threatening forms. Over all the surface of the islet we carried Connie,
+and from three sides of this sea-fortress she looked abroad over "the
+Atlantic's level powers." It blew a gentle ethereal breeze on the top;
+but had there been such a wind as I have since stood against on that
+fearful citadel of nature, I should have been in terror lest we should
+all be blown, into the deep. Over the edge she peeped at the strange
+fantastic needle-rock, and round the corner she peeped to see Wynnie
+and her mother seated in what they call Arthur's chair--a canopied
+hollow wrought in the plated rock by the mightiest of all solvents--air
+and water; till at length it was time that we should take our leave of
+the few sheep that fed over the place, and issuing by the gothic door,
+wind away down the dangerous path to the safe ground below.
+
+"I think we had better tie up your eyes again, Connie?" I said.
+
+"Why?" she asked, in wonderment. "There's nothing higher yet, is there?"
+
+"No, my love. If there were, you would hardly be able for it to-day, I
+should think. It is only to keep you from being frightened at the
+precipice as you go down."
+
+"But I sha'n't be frightened, papa."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"Because you are going to carry me."
+
+"But what if I should slip? I might, you know."
+
+"I don't mind. I sha'n't mind being tumbled over the precipice, if you
+do it. I sha'n't be to blame, and I'm sure you won't, papa." Then she
+drew my head down and whispered in my ear, "If I get as much more by
+being killed, as I have got by having my poor back hurt, I'm sure it
+will be well worth it."
+
+I tried to smile a reply, for I could not speak one. We took her just
+as she was, and with some tremor on my part, but not a single slip, we
+bore her down the winding path, her face showing all the time that,
+instead of being afraid, she was in a state of ecstatic delight. My
+wife, I could see, was nervous, however; and she breathed a sigh of
+relief when we were once more at the foot.
+
+"Well, I'm glad that's over," she said.
+
+"So am I," I returned, as we set down the litter.
+
+"Poor papa! I've pulled his arms to pieces! and Mr. Percivale's too!"
+
+Percivale answered first by taking up a huge piece of stone. Then
+turning towards her, he said, "Look here, Miss Connie;" and flung it
+far out from the isthmus on which we were resting. We heard it strike
+on a rock below, and then fall in a shower of fragments. "My arms are
+all right, you see," he said.
+
+Meantime, Wynnie had scrambled down to the shore, where we had not yet
+been. In a few minutes, we still lingering, she came running back to us
+out of breath with the news:
+
+"Papa! Mr. Percivale! there's such a grand cave down there! It goes
+right through under the island."
+
+Connie looked so eager, that Percivale and I glanced at each other, and
+without a word, lifted her, and followed Wynnie. It was a little way
+that we had to carry her down, but it was very broken, and insomuch
+more difficult than the other. At length we stood in the cavern. What a
+contrast to the vision overhead!--nothing to be seen but the cool, dark
+vault of the cave, long and winding, with the fresh seaweed lying on
+its pebbly floor, and its walls wet with the last tide, for every tide
+rolled through in rising and falling--the waters on the opposite sides
+of the islet greeting through this cave; the blue shimmer of the rising
+sea, and the forms of huge outlying rocks, looking in at the further
+end, where the roof rose like a grand cathedral arch; and the green
+gleam of veins rich with copper, dashing and streaking the darkness in
+gloomy little chapels, where the floor of heaped-up pebbles rose and
+rose within till it met the descending roof. It was like a going-down
+from Paradise into the grave--but a cool, friendly, brown-lighted
+grave, which even in its darkest recesses bore some witness to the wind
+of God outside, in the occasional ripple of shadowed light, from the
+play of the sun on the waves, that, fleeted and reflected, wandered
+across its jagged roof. But we dared not keep Connie long in the damp
+coolness; and I have given my reader quite enough of description for
+one hour's reading. He can scarcely be equal to more.
+
+My invalids had now beheld the sea in such a different aspect, that I
+no longer feared to go back to Kilkhaven. Thither we went three days
+after, and at my invitation, Percivale took Turner's place in the
+carriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+JOE AND HIS TROUBLE.
+
+
+How bright the yellow shores of Kilkhaven looked after the dark sands
+of Tintagel! But how low and tame its highest cliffs after the mighty
+rampart of rocks which there face the sea like a cordon of fierce
+guardians! It was pleasant to settle down again in what had begun to
+look like home, and was indeed made such by the boisterous welcome of
+Dora and the boys. Connie's baby crowed aloud, and stretched forth her
+chubby arms at sight of her. The wind blew gently around us, full both
+of the freshness of the clean waters and the scents of the
+down-grasses, to welcome us back. And the dread vision of the shore had
+now receded so far into the past, that it was no longer able to hurt.
+
+We had called at the blacksmith's house on our way home, and found that
+he was so far better as to be working at his forge again. His mother
+said he was used to such attacks, and soon got over them. I, however,
+feared that they indicated an approaching break-down.
+
+"Indeed, sir," she said, "Joe might be well enough if he liked. It's
+all his own fault."
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked. "I cannot believe that your son is in any
+way guilty of his own illness."
+
+"He's a well-behaved lad, my Joe," she answered; "but he hasn't learned
+what I had to learn long ago."
+
+"What is that?" I asked.
+
+"To make up his mind, and stick to it. To do one thing or the other."
+
+She was a woman with a long upper lip and a judicial face, and as she
+spoke, her lip grew longer and longer; and when she closed her mouth in
+mark of her own resolution, that lip seemed to occupy two-thirds of all
+her face under the nose.
+
+"And what is it he won't do?"
+
+"I don't mind whether he does it or not, if he would only
+make--up--his--mind--and--stick--to--it."
+
+"What is it you want him to do, then?"
+
+"I don't want him to do it, I'm sure. It's no good to me--and wouldn't
+be much to him, that I'll be bound. Howsomever, he must please himself."
+
+I thought it not very wonderful that he looked gloomy, if there was no
+more sunshine for him at home than his mother's face indicated. Few
+things can make a man so strong and able for his work as a sun indoors,
+whose rays are smiles, ever ready to shine upon him when he opens the
+door,--the face of wife or mother or sister. Now his mother's face
+certainly was not sunny. No doubt it must have shone upon him when he
+was a baby. God has made that provision for babies, who need sunshine
+so much that a mother's face cannot help being sunny to them: why
+should the sunshine depart as the child grows older?
+
+"Well, I suppose I must not ask. But I fear your son is very far from
+well. Such attacks do not often occur without serious mischief
+somewhere. And if there is anything troubling him, he is less likely to
+get over it."
+
+"If he would let somebody make up his mind for him, and then stick to
+it--"
+
+"O, but that is impossible, you know. A man must make up his own mind."
+
+"That's just what he won't do."
+
+All the time she looked naughty, only after a self-righteous fashion.
+It was evident that whatever was the cause of it, she was not in
+sympathy with her son, and therefore could not help him out of any
+difficulty he might be in. I made no further attempt to learn from her
+the cause of her son's discomfort, clearly a deeper cause than his
+illness. In passing his workshop, we stopped for a moment, and I made
+an arrangement to meet him at the church the next day.
+
+I was there before him, and found that he had done a good deal since we
+left. Little remained except to get the keys put to rights, and the
+rods attached to the cranks in the box. To-day he was to bring a
+carpenter, a cousin of his own, with him.
+
+They soon arrived, and a small consultation followed. The cousin was a
+bright-eyed, cheruby-cheeked little man, with a ready smile and white
+teeth: I thought he might help me to understand what was amiss in
+Joseph's affairs. But I would not make the attempt except openly. I
+therefore said half in a jocular fashion, as with gloomy,
+self-withdrawn countenance the smith was fitting one loop into another
+in two of his iron rods,--
+
+"I wish we could get this cousin of yours to look a little more
+cheerful. You would think he had quarrelled with the sunshine."
+
+The carpenter showed his white teeth between his rosy lips.
+
+"Well, sir, if you'll excuse me, you see my cousin Joe is not like the
+rest of us. He's a religious man, is Joe."
+
+"But I don't see how that should make him miserable. It hasn't made me
+miserable. I hope I'm a religious man myself. It makes me happy every
+day of my life."
+
+"Ah, well," returned the carpenter, in a thoughtful tone, as he worked
+away gently to get the inside out of the oak-chest without hurting it,
+"I don't say it's the religion, for I don't know; but perhaps it's the
+way he takes it up. He don't look after hisself enough; he's always
+thinking about other people, you see, sir; and it seems to me, sir,
+that if you don't look after yourself, why, who is to look after you?
+That's common sense, _I_ think."
+
+It was a curious contrast--the merry friendly face, which shone
+good-fellowship to all mankind, accusing the sombre, pale, sad, severe,
+even somewhat bitter countenance beside him, of thinking too much about
+other people, and too little about himself. Of course it might be
+correct in a way. There is all the difference between a comfortable,
+healthy inclination, and a pained, conscientious principle. It was a
+smile very unlike his cousin's with which Joe heard his remarks on
+himself.
+
+"But," I said, "you will allow, at least, that if everybody would take
+Joe's way of it, there would then be no occasion for taking care of
+yourself."
+
+"I don't see why, sir."
+
+"Why, because everybody would take care of everybody else."
+
+"Not so well, I doubt, sir."
+
+"Yes, and a great deal better."
+
+"At any rate, that's a long way off; and mean time, _who's_ to take
+care of the odd man like Joe there, that don't look after hisself?"
+
+"Why, God, of course."
+
+"Well, there's just where I'm out. I don't know nothing about that
+branch, sir."
+
+I saw a grateful light mount up in Joe's gloomy eyes as I spoke thus
+upon his side of the question. He said nothing, however; and his cousin
+volunteering no further information, I did not push any advantage I
+might have gained.
+
+At noon I made them leave their work, and come home with me to have
+their dinner; they hoped to finish the job before dusk. Harry Cobb and
+I dropped behind, and Joe Harper walked on in front, apparently sunk in
+meditation.
+
+Scarcely were we out of the churchyard, and on the road leading to the
+rectory, when I saw the sexton's daughter meeting us. She had almost
+come up to Joe before he saw her, for his gaze was bent on the ground,
+and he started. They shook hands in what seemed to me an odd,
+constrained, yet familiar fashion, and then stood as if they wanted to
+talk, but without speaking. Harry and I passed, both with a nod of
+recognition to the young woman, but neither of us had the ill-manners
+to look behind. I glanced at Harry, and he answered me with a queer
+look. When we reached the turning that would hide them from our view, I
+looked back almost involuntarily, and there they were still standing.
+But before we reached the door of the rectory, Joe got up with us.
+
+There was something remarkable in the appearance of Agnes Coombes, the
+sexton's daughter. She was about six-and-twenty, I should imagine, the
+youngest of the family, with a sallow, rather sickly complexion,
+somewhat sorrowful eyes, a smile rare and sweet, a fine figure, tall
+and slender, and a graceful gait. I now saw, I thought, a good
+hair's-breadth further into the smith's affairs. Beyond the
+hair's-breadth, however, all was dark. But I saw likewise that the well
+of truth, whence I might draw the whole business, must be the girl's
+mother.
+
+After the men had had their dinner and rested a while, they went back
+to the church, and I went to the sexton's cottage. I found the old man
+seated at the window, with his pot of beer on the sill, and an empty
+plate beside it.
+
+"Come in, sir," he said, rising, as I put my head in at the door. "The
+mis'ess ben't in, but she'll be here in a few minutes."
+
+"O, it's of no consequence," I said. "Are they all well?"
+
+"All comfortable, sir. It be fine dry weather for them, this, sir. It
+be in winter it be worst for them."
+
+"But it's a snug enough shelter you've got here. It seems such, anyhow;
+though, to be sure, it is the blasts of winter that find out the weak
+places both in house and body."
+
+"It ben't the wind touch _them_" he said; "they be safe enough from the
+wind. It be the wet, sir. There ben't much snow in these parts; but
+when it du come, that be very bad for them, poor things!"
+
+Could it be that he was harping on the old theme again?
+
+"But at least this cottage keeps out the wet," I said. "If not, we must
+have it seen to."
+
+"This cottage du well enough, sir. It'll last my time, anyhow."
+
+"Then why are you pitying your family for having to live in it?"
+
+"Bless your heart, sir! It's not them. They du well enough. It's my
+people out yonder. You've got the souls to look after, and I've got the
+bodies. That's what it be, sir. To be sure!"
+
+The last exclamation was uttered in a tone of impatient surprise at my
+stupidity in giving all my thoughts and sympathies to the living, and
+none to the dead. I pursued the subject no further, but as I lay in bed
+that night, it began to dawn upon me as a lovable kind of hallucination
+in which the man indulged. He too had an office in the Church of God,
+and he would magnify that office. He could not bear that there should
+be no further outcome of his labour; that the burying of the dead out
+of sight should be "the be-all and the end-all." He was God's vicar,
+the gardener in God's Acre, as the Germans call the churchyard. When
+all others had forsaken the dead, he remained their friend, caring for
+what little comfort yet remained possible to them. Hence in all changes
+of air and sky above, he attributed to them some knowledge of the same,
+and some share in their consequences even down in the darkness of the
+tomb. It was his way of keeping up the relation between the living and
+the dead. Finding I made him no reply, he took up the word again.
+
+"You've got your part, sir, and I've got mine. You up into the pulpit,
+and I down into the grave. But it'll be all the same by and by."
+
+"I hope it will," I answered. "But when you do go down into your own
+grave, you'll know a good deal less about it than you do now. You'll
+find you've got other things to think about. But here comes your wife.
+She'll talk about the living rather than the dead."
+
+"That's natural, sir. She brought 'em to life, and I buried 'em--at
+least, best part of 'em. If only I had the other two safe down with the
+rest!"
+
+I remembered what the old woman had told me--that she had two boys _in_
+the sea; and I knew therefore what he meant. He regarded his drowned
+boys as still tossed about in the weary wet cold ocean, and would have
+gladly laid them to rest in the warm dry churchyard.
+
+He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye with the back of his hand,
+and saying, "Well, I must be off to my gardening," left me with his
+wife. I saw then that, humorist as the old man might be, his humour,
+like that of all true humorists, lay close about the wells of weeping.
+
+"The old man seems a little out of sorts," I said to his wife.
+
+"Well, sir," she answered, with her usual gentleness, a gentleness
+which obedient suffering had perfected, "this be the day he buried our
+Nancy, this day two years; and to-day Agnes be come home from her work
+poorly; and the two things together they've upset him a bit."
+
+"I met Agnes coming this way. Where is she?"
+
+"I believe she be in the churchyard, sir. I've been to the doctor about
+her."
+
+"I hope it's nothing serious."
+
+"I hope not, sir; but you see--four on 'em, sir!"
+
+"Well, she's in God's hands, you know."
+
+"That she be, sir."
+
+"I want to ask you about something, Mrs. Coombes."
+
+"What be that, sir? If I can tell, I will, you may be sure, sir."
+
+"I want to know what's the matter with Joe Harper, the blacksmith."
+
+"They du say it be a consumption, sir."
+
+"But what has he got on his mind?"
+
+"He's got nothing on his mind, sir. He be as good a by as ever stepped,
+I assure you, sir."
+
+"But I am sure there is something or other on his mind. He's not so
+happy as he should be. He's not the man, it seems to me, to be unhappy
+because he's ill. A man like him would not be miserable because he was
+going to die. It might make him look sad sometimes, but not gloomy as
+he looks."
+
+"Well, sir, I believe you be right, and perhaps I know summat. But it's
+part guessing.--I believe my Agnes and Joe Harper are as fond upon one
+another as any two in the county."
+
+"Are they not going to be married then?"
+
+"There be the pint, sir. I don't believe Joe ever said a word o' the
+sort to Aggy. She never could ha' kep it from me, sir."
+
+"Why doesn't he then?"
+
+"That's the pint again, sir. All as knows him says it's because he be
+in such bad health, and he thinks he oughtn't to go marrying with one
+foot in the grave. He never said so to me; but I think very likely that
+be it."
+
+"For that matter, Mrs. Coombes, we've all got one foot in the grave, I
+think."
+
+"That be very true, sir."
+
+"And what does your daughter think?"
+
+"I believe she thinks the same. And so they go on talking to each
+other, quiet-like, like old married folks, not like lovers at all, sir.
+But I can't help fancying it have something to do with my Aggy's pale
+face."
+
+"And something to do with Joe's pale face too, Mrs. Coombes," I said.
+"Thank you. You've told me more than I expected. It explains
+everything. I must have it out with Joe now."
+
+"O deary me! sir, don't go and tell him I said anything, as if I wanted
+him to marry my daughter."
+
+"Don't you be afraid. I'll take good care of that. And don't fancy I'm
+fond of meddling with other people's affairs. But this is a case in
+which I ought to do something. Joe's a fine fellow."
+
+"That he be, sir. I couldn't wish a better for a son-in-law."
+
+I put on my hat.
+
+"You won't get me into no trouble with Joe, will ye, sir!"
+
+"Indeed I will not, Mrs. Coombes. I should be doing a great deal more
+harm than good if I said a word to make him doubt you."
+
+I went straight to the church. There were the two men working away in
+the shadowy tower, and there was Agnes standing beside, knitting like
+her mother, so quiet, so solemn even, that it did indeed look as if she
+were a long-married wife, hovering about her husband at his work. Harry
+was saying something to her as I went in, but when they saw me they
+were silent, and Agnes gently withdrew.
+
+"Do you think you will get through to-night?" I asked.
+
+"Sure of it, sir," answered Harry.
+
+"You shouldn't be sure of anything, Harry. We are told in the New
+Testament that we ought to say _If the Lord will_," said Joe.
+
+"Now, Joe, you're too hard upon Harry," I said. "You don't think that
+the Bible means to pull a man up every step like that, till he's afraid
+to speak a word. It was about a long journey and a year's residence
+that the Apostle James was speaking."
+
+"No doubt, sir. But the principle's the same. Harry can no more be sure
+of finishing his work before it be dark, than those people could be of
+going their long journey."
+
+"That is perfectly true. But you are taking the letter for the spirit,
+and that, I suspect, in more ways than one. The religion does not lie
+in not being sure about anything, but in a loving desire that the will
+of God in the matter, whatever it be, may be done. And if Harry has not
+learned yet to care about the will of God, what is the good of coming
+down upon him that way, as if that would teach him in the least. When
+he loves God, then, and not till then, will he care about his will. Nor
+does the religion lie in saying, _if the Lord will_, every time
+anything is to be done. It is a most dangerous thing to use sacred
+words often. It makes them so common to our ear that at length, when
+used most solemnly, they have not half the effect they ought to have,
+and that is a serious loss. What the Apostle means is, that we should
+always be in the mood of looking up to God and having regard to his
+will, not always writing D.V. for instance, as so many do--most
+irreverently, I think--using a Latin contraction for the beautiful
+words, just as if they were a charm, or as if God would take offence if
+they did not make the salvo of acknowledgment. It seems to me quite
+heathenish. Our hearts ought ever to be in the spirit of those words;
+our lips ought to utter them rarely. Besides, there are some things a
+man might be pretty sure the Lord wills."
+
+"It sounds fine, sir; but I'm not sure that I understand what you mean
+to say. It sounds to me like a darkening of wisdom."
+
+I saw that I had irritated him, and so had in some measure lost ground.
+But Harry struck in--
+
+"How _can_ you say that now, Joe? _I_ know what the parson means well
+enough, and everybody knows I ain't got half the brains you've got."
+
+"The reason is, Harry, that he's got something in his head that stands
+in the way."
+
+"And there's nothing in my head _to_ stand in the way!" returned Harry,
+laughing.
+
+This made me laugh too, and even Joe could not help a sympathetic grin.
+By this time it was getting dark.
+
+"I'm afraid, Harry, after all, you won't get through to-night."
+
+"I begin to think so too, sir. And there's Joe saying, 'I told you so,'
+over and over to himself, though he won't say it out like a man."
+
+Joe answered only with another grin.
+
+"I tell you what it is, Harry," I said--"you must come again on Monday.
+And on your way home, just look in and tell Joe's mother that I have
+kept him over to-morrow. The change will do him good."
+
+"No, sir, that can't he. I haven't got a clean shirt."
+
+"You can have a shirt of mine," I said. "But I'm afraid you'll want
+your Sunday clothes."
+
+"I'll bring them for you, Joe--before you're up," interposed Harry.
+"And then you can go to church with Aggy Coombes, you know."
+
+Here was just what I wanted.
+
+"Hold your tongue, Harry," said Joe angrily. "You're talking of what
+you don't know anything about."
+
+"Well, Joe, I ben't a fool, if I ben't so religious as you be. You
+ben't a bad fellow, though you be a Methodist, and I ben't a fool,
+though I be Harry Cobb."
+
+"What do you mean, Harry? Do hold your tongue."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you what I mean first, and then I'll hold my tongue. I
+mean this--that nobody with two eyes, or one eye, for that matter, in
+his head, could help seeing the eyes you and Aggy make at each other,
+and why you don't port your helm and board her--I won't say it's more
+than I know, but I du say it to be more than I think be fair to the
+young woman."
+
+"Hold your tongue, Harry."
+
+"I said I would when I'd answered you as to what I meaned. So no more
+at present; but I'll be over with your clothes afore you're up in the
+morning."
+
+As Harry spoke he was busy gathering his tools.
+
+"They won't be in the way, will they, sir?" he said, as he heaped them
+together in the furthest corner of the tower.
+
+"Not in the least," I returned. "If I had my way, all the tools used in
+building the church should be carved on the posts and pillars of it, to
+indicate the sacredness of labour, and the worship of God that lies,
+not in building the church merely, but in every honest trade honestly
+pursued for the good of mankind and the need of the workman. For a
+necessity of God is laid upon every workman as well as on St. Paul.
+Only St. Paul saw it, and every workman doesn't, Harry."
+
+"Thank you, sir. I like that way of it. I almost think I could be a
+little bit religious after your way of it, sir."
+
+"Almost, Harry!" growled Joe--not unkindly.
+
+"Now, you hold your tongue, Joe," I said. "Leave Harry to me. You may
+take him, if you like, after I've done with him."
+
+Laughing merrily, but making no other reply than a hearty good-night,
+Harry strode away out of the church, and Joe and I went home together.
+
+When he had had his tea, I asked him to go out with me for a walk.
+
+The sun was shining aslant upon the downs from over the sea. We rose
+out of the shadowy hollow to the sunlit brow. I was a little in advance
+of Joe. Happening to turn, I saw the light full on his head and face,
+while the rest of his body had not yet emerged from the shadow.
+
+"Stop, Joe," I said. "I want to see you so for a moment."
+
+He stood--a little surprised.
+
+"You look just like a man rising from the dead, Joe," I said.
+
+"I don't know what you mean, sir," he returned.
+
+"I will describe yourself to you. Your head and face are full of
+sunlight, the rest of your body is still buried in the shadow. Look; I
+will stand where you are now; and you come here. You will soon see what
+I mean."
+
+We changed places. Joe stared for a moment. Then his face brightened.
+
+"I see what you mean, sir," he said. "I fancy you don't mean the
+resurrection of the body, but the resurrection of righteousness."
+
+"I do, Joe. Did it ever strike you that the whole history of the
+Christian life is a series of such resurrections? Every time a man
+bethinks himself that he is not walking in the light, that he has been
+forgetting himself, and must repent, that he has been asleep and must
+awake, that he has been letting his garments trail, and must gird up
+the loins of his mind--every time this takes place, there is a
+resurrection in the world. Yes, Joe; and every time that a man finds
+that his heart is troubled, that he is not rejoicing in God, a
+resurrection must follow--a resurrection out of the night of troubled
+thoughts into the gladness of the truth. For the truth is, and ever
+was, and ever must be, gladness, however much the souls on which it
+shines may be obscured by the clouds of sorrow, troubled by the
+thunders of fear, or shot through with the lightnings of pain. Now,
+Joe, will you let me tell you what you are like--I do not know your
+thoughts; I am only judging from your words and looks?"
+
+"You may if you like, sir," answered Joe, a little sulkily. But I was
+not to be repelled.
+
+I stood up in the sunlight, so that my eyes caught only about half the
+sun's disc. Then I bent my face towards the earth.
+
+"What part of me is the light shining on now, Joe?"
+
+"Just the top of your head," answered he.
+
+"There, then," I returned, "that is just what you are like--a man with
+the light on his head, but not on his face. And why not on your face?
+Because you hold your head down."
+
+"Isn't it possible, sir, that a man might lose the light on his face,
+as you put it, by doing his duty?"
+
+"That is a difficult question," I replied. "I must think before I
+answer it."
+
+"I mean," added Joe--"mightn't his duty be a painful one?"
+
+"Yes. But I think that would rather etherealise than destroy the light.
+Behind the sorrow would spring a yet greater light from the very duty
+itself. I have expressed myself badly, but you will see what I
+mean.--To be frank with you, Joe, I do not see that light in your face.
+Therefore I think something must be wrong with you. Remember a good man
+is not necessarily in the right. St. Peter was a good man, yet our Lord
+called him Satan--and meant it of course, for he never said what he did
+not mean."
+
+"How can I be wrong when all my trouble comes from doing my
+duty--nothing else, as far as I know?"
+
+"Then," I replied, a sudden light breaking in on my mind, "I doubt
+whether what you suppose to be your duty can be your duty. If it were,
+I do not think it would make you so miserable. At least--I may be
+wrong, but I venture to think so."
+
+"What is a man to go by, then? If he thinks a thing is his duty, is he
+not to do it?"
+
+"Most assuredly--until he knows better. But it is of the greatest
+consequence whether the supposed duty be the will of God or the
+invention of one's own fancy or mistaken judgment. A real duty is
+always something right in itself. The duty a man makes his for the
+time, by supposing it to be a duty, may be something quite wrong in
+itself. The duty of a Hindoo widow is to burn herself on the body of
+her husband. But that duty lasts no longer than till she sees that, not
+being the will of God, it is not her duty. A real duty, on the other
+hand, is a necessity of the human nature, without seeing and doing
+which a man can never attain to the truth and blessedness of his own
+being. It was the duty of the early hermits to encourage the growth of
+vermin upon their bodies, for they supposed that was pleasing to God;
+but they could not fare so well as if they had seen the truth that the
+will of God was cleanliness. And there may be far more serious things
+done by Christian people against the will of God, in the fancy of doing
+their duty, than such a trifle as swarming with worms. In a word,
+thinking a thing is your duty makes it your duty only till you know
+better. And the prime duty of every man is to seek and find, that he
+may do, the will of God."
+
+"But do you think, sir, that a man is likely to be doing what he ought
+not, if he is doing what he don't like?"
+
+"Not so likely, I allow. But there may be ambition in it. A man must
+not want to be better than the right. That is the delusion of the
+anchorite--a delusion in which the man forgets the rights of others for
+the sake of his own sanctity."
+
+"It might be for the sake of another person, and not for the person's
+own sake at all."
+
+"It might be; but except it were the will of God for that other person,
+it would be doing him or her a real injury."
+
+We were coming gradually towards what I wanted to make the point in
+question. I wished him to tell me all about it himself, however, for I
+knew that while advice given on request is generally disregarded, to
+offer advice unasked is worthy only of a fool.
+
+"But how are you to know the will of God in every case?" asked Joe.
+
+"By looking at the general laws of life, and obeying them--except there
+be anything special in a particular case to bring it under a higher
+law."
+
+"Ah! but that be just what there is here."
+
+"Well, my dear fellow, that may be; but the special conduct may not be
+right for the special case for all that. The speciality of the case may
+not be even sufficient to take it from under the ordinary rule. But it
+is of no use talking generals. Let us come to particulars. If you can
+trust me, tell me all about it, and we may be able to let some light
+in. I am sure there is darkness somewhere."
+
+"I will turn it over in my mind, sir; and if I can bring myself to talk
+about it, I will. I would rather tell you than anyone else."
+
+I said no more. We watched a glorious sunset--there never was a grander
+place for sunsets--and went home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+A SMALL ADVENTURE.
+
+
+The next morning Harry came with the clothes. But Joe did not go to
+church. Neither did Agnes make her appearance that morning. They were
+both present at the evening service, however.
+
+When we came out of church, it was cloudy and dark, and the wind was
+blowing cold from the sea. The sky was covered with one cloud, but the
+waves tossing themselves against the rocks, flashed whiteness out of
+the general gloom. As the tide rose the wind increased. It was a night
+of surly temper--hard and gloomy. Not a star cracked the blue
+above--there was no blue; and the wind was _gurly_; I once heard that
+word in Scotland, and never forgot it.
+
+After one of our usual gatherings in Connie's room, which were much
+shorter here because of the evening service in summer, I withdrew till
+supper should be ready.
+
+Now I have always had, as I think I have incidentally stated before, a
+certain peculiar pleasure in the surly aspects of nature. When I was a
+young man this took form in opposition and defiance; since I had begun
+to grow old the form had changed into a sense of safety. I welcomed
+such aspects, partly at least, because they roused my faith to look
+through and beyond the small region of human conditions in which alone
+the storm can be and blow, and thus induced a feeling like that of the
+child who lies in his warm crib and listens to the howling of one of
+these same storms outside the strong-built house which yet trembles at
+its fiercer onsets: the house is not in danger; or, if it be, that is
+his father's business, not his. Hence it came that, after supper, I put
+on my great-coat and travelling-cap, and went out into the ill-tempered
+night--speaking of it in its human symbolism.
+
+I meant to have a stroll down to the breakwater, of which I have yet
+said little, but which was a favourite resort, both of myself and my
+children. At the further end of it, always covered at high water, was
+an outlying cluster of low rocks, in the heart of which the lord of the
+manor, a noble-hearted Christian gentleman of the old school, had
+constructed a bath of graduated depth--an open-air swimming-pool--the
+only really safe place for men who were swimmers to bathe in. Thither I
+was in the habit of taking my two little men every morning, and bathing
+with them, that I might develop the fish that was in them; for, as
+George Herbert says:
+
+  "Man is everything,
+  And more: he is a tree, yet bears no fruit;
+  A beast, yet is, or should be, more;"
+
+and he might have gone on to say that he is, or should be, a fish as
+well.
+
+It will seem strange to any reader who can recall the position of my
+Connie's room, that the nearest way to the breakwater should be through
+that room; but so it was. I mention the fact because I want my readers
+to understand a certain peculiarity of the room. By the side of the
+window which looked out upon the breakwater was a narrow door,
+apparently of a closet or cupboard, which communicated, however, with a
+narrow, curving, wood-built passage, leading into a little wooden hut,
+the walls of which were by no means impervious to the wind, for they
+were formed of outside-planks, with the bark still upon them. From this
+hut one or two little windows looked seaward, and a door led out on the
+bit of sward in which lay the flower-bed under Connie's window. From
+this spot again a door in the low wall and thick hedge led out on the
+downs, where a path wound along the cliffs that formed the side of the
+bay, till, descending under the storm-tower, it brought you to the root
+of the breakwater.
+
+This mole stretched its long strong low back to a rock a good way out,
+breaking the force of the waves, and rendering the channel of a small
+river, that here flowed into the sea across the sands from the mouth of
+the canal, a refuge from the Atlantic. But it was a roadway often hard
+to reach. In fair weather even, the wind falling as the vessel rounded
+the point of the breakwater into the calm of the projecting headlands,
+the under-current would sometimes dash her helpless on the rocks.
+During all this heavenly summer there had been no thought or fear of
+any such disaster. The present night was a hint of what weather would
+yet come.
+
+When I went into Connie's room, I found her lying in bed a very picture
+of peace. But my entrance destroyed the picture.
+
+"Papa," she said, "why have you got your coat on? Surely you are not
+going out to-night. The wind is blowing dreadfully."
+
+"Not very dreadfully, Connie. It blew much worse the night we found
+your baby."
+
+"But it is very dark."
+
+"I allow that; but there is a glimmer from the sea. I am only going on
+the breakwater for a few minutes. You know I like a stormy night quite
+as much as a fine one."
+
+"I shall be miserable till you come home, papa."
+
+"Nonsense, Connie. You don't think your father hasn't sense to take
+care of himself! Or rather, Connie, for I grant that is poor ground of
+comfort, you don't think I can go anywhere without my Father to take
+care of me?"
+
+"But there is no occasion--is there, papa?"
+
+"Do you think I should be better pleased with my boys if they shrunk
+from everything involving the least possibility of danger because there
+was no occasion for it? That is just the way to make cowards. And I am
+certain God would not like his children to indulge in such moods of
+self-preservation as that. He might well be ashamed of them. The
+fearful are far more likely to meet with accidents than the courageous.
+But really, Connie, I am almost ashamed of talking so. It is all your
+fault. There is positively no ground for apprehension, and I hope you
+won't spoil my walk by the thought that my foolish little girl is
+frightened."
+
+"I will be good--indeed I will, papa," she said, holding up her mouth
+to kiss me.
+
+I left her room, and went through the wooden passage into the bark hut.
+The wind roared about it, shook it, and pawed it, and sung and whistled
+in the chinks of the planks. I went out and shut the door. That moment
+the wind seized upon me, and I had to fight with it. When I got on the
+path leading along the edge of the downs, I felt something lighter than
+any feather fly in my face. When I put up my hand, I found my cheek
+wet. Again and again I was thus assailed, but when I got to the
+breakwater I found what it was. They were flakes of foam, bubbles
+worked up into little masses of adhering thousands, which the wind blew
+off the waters and across the downs, carrying some of them miles
+inland. When I reached the breakwater, and looked along its ridge
+through the darkness of the night, I was bewildered to see a whiteness
+lying here and there in a great patch upon its top. They were but
+accumulations of these foam-flakes, like soap-suds, lying so thick that
+I expected to have to wade through them, only they vanished at the
+touch of my feet. Till then I had almost believed it was snow I saw. On
+the edge of the waves, in quieter spots, they lay like yeast, foaming
+and working. Now and then a little rush of water from a higher wave
+swept over the top of the broad breakwater, as with head bowed sideways
+against the wind, I struggled along towards the rock at its end; but I
+said to myself, "The tide is falling fast, and salt water hurts
+nobody," and struggled on over the huge rough stones of the mighty
+heap, outside which the waves were white with wrath, inside which they
+had fallen asleep, only heaving with the memory of their late unrest. I
+reached the tall rock at length, climbed the rude stair leading up to
+the flagstaff, and looked abroad, if looking it could be called, into
+the thick dark. But the wind blew so strong on the top that I was glad
+to descend. Between me and the basin where yesterday morning I had
+bathed in still water and sunshine with my boys, rolled the deathly
+waves. I wandered on the rough narrow space yet uncovered, stumbling
+over the stones and the rocky points between which they lay, stood here
+and there half-meditating, and at length, finding a sheltered nook in a
+mass of rock, sat with the wind howling and the waves bursting around
+me. There I fell into a sort of brown study--almost a half-sleep.
+
+But I had not sat long before I came broad awake, for I heard voices,
+low and earnest. One I recognised as Joe's voice. The other was a
+woman's. I could not tell what they said for some time, and therefore
+felt no immediate necessity for disclosing my proximity, but sat
+debating with myself whether I should speak to them or not. At length,
+in a lull of the wind, I heard the woman say--I could fancy with a
+sigh--
+
+"I'm sure you'll du what is right, Joe. Don't 'e think o' me, Joe."
+
+"It's just of you that I du think, Aggy. You know it ben't for my sake.
+Surely you know that?"
+
+There was no answer for a moment. I was still doubting what I had best
+do--go away quietly or let them know I was there--when she spoke again.
+There was a momentary lull now in the noises of both wind and water,
+and I heard what she said well enough.
+
+"It ben't for me to contradict you, Joe. But I don't think you be going
+to die. You be no worse than last year. Be you now, Joe?"
+
+It flashed across me how once before, a stormy night and darkness had
+brought me close to a soul in agony. Then I was in agony myself; now
+the world was all fair and hopeful around me--the portals of the world
+beyond ever opening wider as I approached them, and letting out more of
+their glory to gladden the path to their threshold. But here were two
+souls straying in a mist which faith might roll away, and leave them
+walking in the light. The moment was come. I must speak.
+
+"Joe!" I called out.
+
+"Who's there?" he cried; and I heard him start to his feet.
+
+"Only Mr. Walton. Where are you?"
+
+"We can't be very far off," he answered, not in a tone of any pleasure
+at finding me so nigh.
+
+I rose, and peering about through the darkness, found that they were a
+little higher up on the same rock by which I was sheltered.
+
+"You mustn't think," I said, "that I have been eavesdropping. I had no
+idea anyone was near me till I heard your voices, and I did not hear a
+word till just the last sentence or two."
+
+"I saw someone go up the Castle-rock," said Joe; "but I thought he was
+gone away again. It will be a lesson to me."
+
+"I'm no tell-tale, Joe," I returned, as I scrambled up the rock. "You
+will have no cause to regret that I happened to overhear a little. I am
+sure, Joe, you will never say anything you need be ashamed of. But what
+I heard was sufficient to let me into the secret of your trouble. Will
+you let me talk to Joe, Agnes? I've been young myself, and, to tell the
+truth, I don't think I'm old yet."
+
+"I am sure, sir," she answered, "you won't be hard on Joe and me. I
+don't suppose there be anything wrong in liking each other, though we
+can't be--married."
+
+She spoke in a low tone, and her voice trembled very much; yet there
+was a certain womanly composure in her utterance. "I'm sure it's very
+bold of me to talk so," she added, "but Joe will tell you all about it."
+
+I was close beside them now, and fancied I saw through the dusk the
+motion of her hand stealing into his.
+
+"Well, Joe, this is just what I wanted," I said. "A woman can be braver
+than a big smith sometimes. Agnes has done her part. Now you do yours,
+and tell me all about it."
+
+No response followed my adjuration. I must help him.
+
+"I think I know how the matter lies, Joe. You think you are not going
+to live long, and that therefore you ought not to marry. Am I right?"
+
+"Not far off it, sir," he answered.
+
+"Now, Joe," I said, "can't we talk as friends about this matter? I have
+no right to intrude into your affairs--none in the least--except what
+friendship gives me. If you say I am not to talk about it, I shall be
+silent. To force advice upon you would be as impertinent as useless."
+
+"It's all the same, I'm afraid, sir. My mind has been made up for a
+long time. What right have I to bring other people into trouble? But I
+take it kind of you, sir, though I mayn't look over-pleased. Agnes
+wants to hear your way of it. I'm agreeable."
+
+This was not very encouraging. Still I thought it sufficient ground for
+proceeding.
+
+"I suppose you will allow that the root of all Christian behaviour is
+the will of God?"
+
+"Surely, sir."
+
+"Is it not the will of God, then, that when a man and woman love each
+other, they should marry?"
+
+"Certainly, sir--where there be no reasons against it."
+
+"Of course. And you judge you see reason for not doing so, else you
+would?"
+
+"I do see that a man should not bring a woman into trouble for the sake
+of being comfortable himself for the rest of a few weary days."
+
+Agnes was sobbing gently behind her handkerchief. I knew how gladly she
+would be Joe's wife, if only to nurse him through his last illness.
+
+"Not except it would make her comfortable too, I grant you, Joe. But
+listen to me. In the first place, you don't know, and you are not
+required to know, when you are going to die. In fact, you have nothing
+to do with it. Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation
+of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best
+preparation for the night is to work while the day lasts, diligently.
+The best preparation for death is life. Besides, I have known delicate
+people who have outlived all their strong relations, and been left
+alone in the earth--because they had possibly taken too much care of
+themselves. But marriage is God's will, and death is God's will, and
+you have no business to set the one over against, as antagonistic to,
+the other. For anything you know, the gladness and the peace of
+marriage may be the very means intended for your restoration to health
+and strength. I suspect your desire to marry, fighting against the
+fancy that you ought not to marry, has a good deal to do with the state
+of health in which you now find yourself. A man would get over many
+things if he were happy, that he cannot get over when he is miserable."
+
+"But it's for Aggy. You forget that."
+
+"I do not forget it. What right have you to seek for her another kind
+of welfare than you would have yourself? Are you to treat her as if she
+were worldly when you are not--to provide for her a comfort which
+yourself you would despise? Why should you not marry because you have
+to die soon?--if you _are_ thus doomed, which to me is by no means
+clear. Why not have what happiness you may for the rest of your
+sojourn? If you find at the end of twenty years that here you are after
+all, you will be rather sorry you did not do as I say."
+
+"And if I find myself dying at the end of six months'?"
+
+"You will thank God for those six months. The whole thing, my dear
+fellow, is a want of faith in God. I do not doubt you think you are
+doing right, but, I repeat, the whole thing comes from want of faith in
+God. You will take things into your own hands, and order them after a
+preventive and self-protective fashion, lest God should have ordained
+the worst for you, which worst, after all, would be best met by doing
+his will without inquiry into the future; and which worst is no evil.
+Death is no more an evil than marriage is."
+
+"But you don't see it as I do," persisted the blacksmith.
+
+"Of course I don't. I think you see it as it is not."
+
+He remained silent for a little. A shower of spray fell upon us. He
+started.
+
+"What a wave!" he cried. "That spray came over the top of the rock. We
+shall have to run for it."
+
+I fancied that he only wanted to avoid further conversation.
+
+"There's no hurry," I said. "It was high water an hour and a half ago."
+
+"You don't know this coast, sir," returned he, "or you wouldn't talk
+like that."
+
+As he spoke he rose, and going from under the shelter of the rock,
+looked along.
+
+"For God's sake, Aggy!" he cried in terror, "come at once. Every other
+wave be rushing across the breakwater as if it was on the level."
+
+So saying, he hurried back, caught her by the hand, and began to draw
+her along.
+
+"Hadn't we better stay where we are?" I suggested.
+
+"If you can stand the night in the cold. But Aggy here is delicate; and
+I don't care about being out all night. It's not the tide, sir; it's a
+ground swell--from a storm somewhere out at sea. That never asks no
+questions about tide or no tide."
+
+"Come along, then," I said. "But just wait one minute more. It is
+better to be ready for the worst."
+
+For I remembered that the day before I had seen a crowbar lying among
+the stones, and I thought it might be useful. In a moment or two I had
+found it, and returning, gave it to Joe. Then I took the girl's
+disengaged hand. She thanked me in a voice perfectly calm and firm. Joe
+took the bar in haste, and drew Agnes towards the breakwater.
+
+Any real thought of danger had not yet crossed my mind. But when I
+looked along the outstretched back of the mole, and saw a dim sheet of
+white sweep across it, I felt that there was ground for his anxiety,
+and prepared myself for a struggle.
+
+"Do you know what to do with the crowbar, Joe?" I said, grasping my own
+stout oak-stick more firmly.
+
+"Perfectly," answered Joe. "To stick between the stones and hold on. We
+must watch our time between the waves."
+
+"You take the command, then, Joe," I returned. "You see better than I
+do, and you know the ways of that raging wild beast there better than I
+do. I will obey orders--one of which, no doubt, will be, not for wind
+or sea to lose hold of Agnes--eh, Joe?"
+
+Joe gave a grim enough laugh in reply, and we started, he carrying his
+crowbar in his right hand towards the advancing sea, and I my oak-stick
+in my left towards the still water within.
+
+"Quick march!" said Joe, and away we went out on the breakwater.
+
+Now the back of the breakwater was very rugged, for it was formed of
+huge stones, with wide gaps between, where the waters had washed out
+the cement, and worn their edges. But what impeded our progress secured
+our safety.
+
+"Halt!" cried Joe, when we were yet but a few yards beyond the shelter
+of the rocks. "There's a topper coming."
+
+We halted at the word of command, as a huge wave, with combing crest,
+rushed against the far out-sloping base of the mole, and flung its
+heavy top right over the middle of the mass, a score or two of yards in
+front of us.
+
+"Now for it!" cried Joe. "Run!"
+
+We did run. In my mind there was just sense enough of danger to add to
+the pleasure of the excitement. I did not know how much danger there
+was. Over the rough worn stones we sped stumbling.
+
+"Halt!" cried the smith once more, and we did halt; but this time, as
+it turned out, in the middle front of the coming danger.
+
+"God be with us!" I exclaimed, when the huge billow showed itself
+through the night, rushing towards the mole. The smith stuck his
+crowbar between two great stones. To this he held on with one hand, and
+threw the other arm round Agnes's waist. I, too, had got my oak firmly
+fixed, held on with one hand, and threw the other arm round Agnes. It
+took but a moment.
+
+"Now then!" cried Joe. "Here she comes! Hold on, sir. Hold on, Aggy!"
+
+But when I saw the height of the water, as it rushed on us up the
+sloping side of the mound, I cried out in my turn, "Down, Joe! Down on
+your face, and let it over us easy! Down Agnes!"
+
+They obeyed. We threw ourselves across the breakwater, with our heads
+to the coming foe, and I grasped my stick close to the stones with all
+the power of a hand that was then strong. Over us burst the mighty
+wave, floating us up from the stones where we lay. But we held on, the
+wave passed, and we sprung gasping to our feet.
+
+"Now, now!" cried Joe and I together, and, heavy as we were, with the
+water pouring from us, we flew across the remainder of the heap, and
+arrived, panting and safe, at the other end, ere one wave more had
+swept the surface. The moment we were in safety we turned and looked
+back over the danger we had traversed. It was to see a huge billow
+sweep the breakwater from end to end. We looked at each other for a
+moment without speaking.
+
+"I believe, sir," said Joe at length, with slow and solemn speech, "if
+you hadn't taken the command at that moment we should all have been
+lost."
+
+"It seems likely enough, when I look back on it. For one thing, I was
+not sure that my stick would stand, so I thought I had better grasp it
+low down."
+
+"We were awfully near death," said Joe.
+
+"Nearer than you thought, Joe; and yet we escaped it. Things don't go
+all as we fancy, you see. Faith is as essential to manhood as
+foresight--believe me, Joe. It is very absurd to trust God for the
+future, and not trust him for the present. The man who is not anxious
+is the man most likely to do the right thing. He is cool and collected
+and ready. Our Lord therefore told his disciples that when they should
+be brought before kings and rulers, they were to take no thought what
+answer they should make, for it would be given them when the time came."
+
+We were climbing the steep path up to the downs. Neither of my
+companions spoke.
+
+"You have escaped one death together," I said at length: "dare another."
+
+Still neither of them returned an answer. When we came near the
+parsonage, I said, "Now, Joe, you must go in and get to bed at once. I
+will take Agnes home. You can trust me not to say anything against you?"
+
+Joe laughed rather hoarsely, and replied: "As you please, sir. Good
+night, Aggie. Mind you get to bed as fast as you can."
+
+When I returned from giving Agnes over to her parents, I made haste to
+change my clothes, and put on my warm dressing-gown. I may as well
+mention at once, that not one of us was the worse for our ducking. I
+then went up to Connie's room.
+
+"Here I am, you see, Connie, quite safe."
+
+"I've been lying listening to every blast of wind since you went out,
+papa. But all I could do was to trust in God."
+
+"Do you call that _all_, Connie? Believe me, there is more power in
+that than any human being knows the tenth part of yet. It is indeed
+_all_."
+
+I said no more then. I told my wife about it that night, but we were
+well into another month before I told Connie.
+
+When I left her, I went to Joe's room to see how he was, and found him
+having some gruel. I sat down on the edge of his bed, and said,
+
+"Well, Joe, this is better than under water. I hope you won't be the
+worse for it."
+
+"I don't much care what comes of me, sir. It will be all over soon."
+
+"But you ought to care what comes of you, Joe. I will tell you why. You
+are an instrument out of which ought to come praise to God, and,
+therefore, you ought to care for the instrument."
+
+"That way, yes, sir, I ought."
+
+"And you have no business to be like some children who say, 'Mamma
+won't give me so and so,' instead of asking her to give it them."
+
+"I see what you mean, sir. But really you put me out before the young
+woman. I couldn't say before her what I meant. Suppose, you know, sir,
+there was to come a family. It might be, you know."
+
+"Of course. What else would you have?"
+
+"But if I was to die, where would she be then?"
+
+"In God's hands; just as she is now."
+
+"But I ought to take care that she is not left with a burden like that
+to provide for."
+
+"O, Joe! how little you know a woman's heart! It would just be the
+greatest comfort she could have for losing you--that's all. Many a
+woman has married a man she did not care enough for, just that she
+might have a child of her own to let out her heart upon. I don't say
+that is right, you know. Such love cannot be perfect. A woman ought to
+love her child because it is her husband's more than because it is her
+own, and because it is God's more than either's. I saw in the papers
+the other day, that a woman was brought before the Recorder of London
+for stealing a baby, when the judge himself said that there was no
+imaginable motive for her action but a motherly passion to possess the
+child. It is the need of a child that makes so many women take to poor
+miserable, broken-nosed lap-dogs; for they are self-indulgent, and
+cannot face the troubles and dangers of adopting a child. They would if
+they might get one of a good family, or from a respectable home; but
+they dare not take an orphan out of the dirt, lest it should spoil
+their silken chairs. But that has nothing to do with our argument. What
+I mean is this, that if Agnes really loves you, as no one can look in
+her face and doubt, she will be far happier if you leave her a
+child--yes, she will be happier if you only leave her your name for
+hers--than if you died without calling her your wife."
+
+I took Joe's basin from him, and he lay down. He turned his face to the
+wall. I waited a moment, but finding him silent, bade him good-night,
+and left the room.
+
+A month after, I married them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE HARVEST.
+
+
+It was some time before we got the bells to work to our mind, but at
+last we succeeded. The worst of it was to get the cranks, which at
+first required strong pressure on the keys, to work easily enough. But
+neither Joe nor his cousin spared any pains to perfect the attempt,
+and, as I say, at length we succeeded. I took Wynnie down to the
+instrument and made her try whether she could not do something, and she
+succeeded in making the old tower discourse loudly and eloquently.
+
+By this time the thanksgiving for the harvest was at hand: on the
+morning of that first of all would I summon the folk to their prayers
+with the sound of the full peal. And I wrote a little hymn of praise to
+the God of the harvest, modelling it to one of the oldest tunes in that
+part of the country, and I had it printed on slips of paper and laid
+plentifully on the benches. What with the calling of the bells, like
+voices in the highway, and the solemn meditation of the organ within to
+bear aloft the thoughts of those who heard, and came to the prayer and
+thanksgiving in common, and the message which God had given me to utter
+to them, I hoped that we should indeed keep holiday.
+
+Wynnie summoned the parish with the hundredth psalm pealed from aloft,
+dropping from the airy regions of the tower on village and hamlet and
+cottage, calling aloud--for who could dissociate the words from the
+music, though the words are in the Scotch psalms?--written none the
+less by an Englishman, however English wits may amuse themselves with
+laughing at their quaintness--calling aloud,
+
+  "All people that on earth do dwell
+  Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;
+  Him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell--
+  Come ye before him and rejoice."
+
+Then we sang the psalm before the communion service, making bold in the
+name of the Lord to serve him with _mirth_ as in the old version, and
+not with the _fear_ with which some editor, weak in faith, has presumed
+to alter the line. Then before the sermon we sang the hymn I had
+prepared--a proceeding justifiable by many an example in the history of
+the church while she was not only able to number singers amongst her
+clergy, but those singers were capable of influencing the whole heart
+and judgment of the nation with their songs. Ethelwyn played the organ.
+The song I had prepared was this:
+
+  "We praise the Life of All;
+  From buried seeds so small
+  Who makes the ordered ranks of autumn stand;
+  Who stores the corn
+  In rick and barn
+  To feed the winter of the land.
+
+  We praise the Life of Light!
+  Who from the brooding night
+  Draws out the morning holy, calm, and grand;
+  Veils up the moon,
+  Sends out the sun,
+  To glad the face of all the land.
+
+  We praise the Life of Work,
+  Who from sleep's lonely dark
+  Leads forth his children to arise and stand,
+  Then go their way,
+  The live-long day,
+  To trust and labour in the land.
+
+  We praise the Life of Good,
+  Who breaks sin's lazy mood,
+  Toilsomely ploughing up the fruitless sand.
+  The furrowed waste
+  They leave, and haste
+  Home, home, to till their Father's land.
+
+  We praise the Life of Life,
+  Who in this soil of strife
+  Casts us at birth, like seed from sower's hand;
+  To die and so
+  Like corn to grow
+  A golden harvest in his land."
+
+After we had sung this hymn, the meaning of which is far better than
+the versification, I preached from the words of St. Paul, "If by any
+means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. Not as though I
+had already attained, either were already perfect." And this is
+something like what I said to them:
+
+"The world, my friends, is full of resurrections, and it is not always
+of the same resurrection that St. Paul speaks. Every night that folds
+us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early
+and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it--the day rises out of
+the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life.
+That you may feel that the sunrise is a resurrection--the word
+resurrection just means a rising again--I will read you a little
+description of it from a sermon by a great writer and great preacher
+called Jeremy Taylor. Listen. 'But as when the sun approaching towards
+the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven and
+sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and
+calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a
+cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns
+like those which decked the brows of Moses, when he was forced to wear
+a veil, because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a
+man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face
+and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud
+often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets
+quickly; so is a man's reason and his life.' Is not this a resurrection
+of the day out of the night? Or hear how Milton makes his Adam and Eve
+praise God in the morning,--
+
+  'Ye mists and exhalations that now rise
+  From hill or streaming lake, dusky or gray,
+  Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold,
+  In honour to the world's great Author rise,
+  Whether to deck with clouds the uncoloured sky,
+  Or wet the thirsty earth with falling showers,
+  Rising or falling still advance his praise.'
+
+But it is yet more of a resurrection to you. Think of your own
+condition through the night and in the morning. You die, as it were,
+every night. The death of darkness comes down over the earth; but a
+deeper death, the death of sleep, descends on you. A power overshadows
+you; your eyelids close, you cannot keep them open if you would; your
+limbs lie moveless; the day is gone; your whole life is gone; you have
+forgotten everything; an evil man might come and do with your goods as
+he pleased; you are helpless. But the God of the Resurrection is awake
+all the time, watching his sleeping men and women, even as a mother who
+watches her sleeping baby, only with larger eyes and more full of love
+than hers; and so, you know not how, all at once you know that you are
+what you are; that there is a world that wants you outside of you, and
+a God that wants you inside of you; you rise from the death of sleep,
+not by your own power, for you knew nothing about it; God put his hand
+over your eyes, and you were dead; he lifted his hand and breathed
+light on you and you rose from the dead, thanked the God who raised you
+up, and went forth to do your work. From darkness to light; from
+blindness to seeing; from knowing nothing to looking abroad on the
+mighty world; from helpless submission to willing obedience,--is not
+this a resurrection indeed? That St. Paul saw it to be such may be
+shown from his using the two things with the same meaning when he says,
+'Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall
+give thee light.' No doubt he meant a great deal more. No man who
+understands what he is speaking about can well mean only one thing at a
+time.
+
+"But to return to the resurrections we see around us in nature. Look at
+the death that falls upon the world in winter. And look how it revives
+when the sun draws near enough in the spring to wile the life in it
+once more out of its grave. See how the pale, meek snowdrops come up
+with their bowed heads, as if full of the memory of the fierce winds
+they encountered last spring, and yet ready in the strength of their
+weakness to encounter them again. Up comes the crocus, bringing its
+gold safe from the dark of its colourless grave into the light of its
+parent gold. Primroses, and anemones, and blue-bells, and a thousand
+other children of the spring, hear the resurrection-trumpet of the wind
+from the west and south, obey, and leave their graves behind to breathe
+the air of the sweet heavens. Up and up they come till the year is
+glorious with the rose and the lily, till the trees are not only
+clothed upon with new garments of loveliest green, but the fruit-tree
+bringeth forth its fruit, and the little children of men are made glad
+with apples, and cherries, and hazel-nuts. The earth laughs out in
+green and gold. The sky shares in the grand resurrection. The garments
+of its mourning, wherewith it made men sad, its clouds of snow and hail
+and stormy vapours, are swept away, have sunk indeed to the earth, and
+are now humbly feeding the roots of the flowers whose dead stalks they
+beat upon all the winter long. Instead, the sky has put on the garments
+of praise. Her blue, coloured after the sapphire-floor on which stands
+the throne of him who is the Resurrection and the Life, is dashed and
+glorified with the pure white of sailing clouds, and at morning and
+evening prayer, puts on colours in which the human heart drowns itself
+with delight--green and gold and purple and rose. Even the icebergs
+floating about in the lonely summer seas of the north are flashing all
+the glories of the rainbow. But, indeed, is not this whole world itself
+a monument of the Resurrection? The earth was without form and void.
+The wind of God moved on the face of the waters, and up arose this fair
+world. Darkness was on the face of the deep: God said, 'Let there be
+light,' and there was light.
+
+"In the animal world as well, you behold the goings of the
+Resurrection. Plainest of all, look at the story of the butterfly--so
+plain that the pagan Greeks called it and the soul by one name--Psyche.
+Psyche meant with them a butterfly or the soul, either. Look how the
+creeping thing, ugly to our eyes, so that we can hardly handle it
+without a shudder, finding itself growing sick with age, straightway
+falls a spinning and weaving at its own shroud, coffin, and grave, all
+in one--to prepare, in fact, for its resurrection; for it is for the
+sake of the resurrection that death exists. Patiently it spins its
+strength, but not its life, away, folds itself up decently, that its
+body may rest in quiet till the new body is formed within it; and at
+length when the appointed hour has arrived, out of the body of this
+crawling thing breaks forth the winged splendour of the butterfly--not
+the same body--a new one built out of the ruins of the old--even as St.
+Paul tells us that it is not the same body _we_ have in the
+resurrection, but a nobler body like ourselves, with all the imperfect
+and evil thing taken away. No more creeping for the butterfly; wings of
+splendour now. Neither yet has it lost the feet wherewith to alight on
+all that is lovely and sweet. Think of it--up from the toilsome journey
+over the low ground, exposed to the foot of every passer-by, destroying
+the lovely leaves upon which it fed, and the fruit which they should
+shelter, up to the path at will through the air, and a gathering of
+food which hurts not the source of it, a food which is but as a tribute
+from the loveliness of the flowers to the yet higher loveliness of the
+flower-angel: is not this a resurrection? Its children too shall pass
+through the same process, to wing the air of a summer noon, and rejoice
+in the ethereal and the pure.
+
+"To return yet again from the human thoughts suggested by the symbol of
+the butterfly"--
+
+Here let me pause for a moment--and there was a corresponding pause,
+though but momentary, in the sermon as I spoke it--to mention a
+curious, and to me at the moment an interesting fact. At this point of
+my address, I caught sight of a white butterfly, a belated one,
+flitting about the church. Absorbed for a moment, my eye wandered after
+it. It was near the bench where my own people sat, and, for one flash
+of thought, I longed that the butterfly would alight on my Wynnie, for
+I was more anxious about her resurrection at the time than about
+anything else. But the butterfly would not. And then I told myself that
+God would, and that the butterfly was only the symbol of a grand truth,
+and of no private interpretation, to make which of it was both
+selfishness and superstition. But all this passed in a flash, and I
+resumed my discourse.
+
+--"I come now naturally to speak of what we commonly call the
+Resurrection. Some say: 'How can the same dust be raised again, when it
+may be scattered to the winds of heaven?' It is a question I hardly
+care to answer. The mere difficulty can in reason stand for nothing
+with God; but the apparent worthlessness of the supposition renders the
+question uninteresting to me. What is of import is, that I should stand
+clothed upon, with a body which is _my_ body because it serves my ends,
+justifies my consciousness of identity by being, in all that was good
+in it, like that which I had before, while now it is tenfold capable of
+expressing the thoughts and feelings that move within me. How can I
+care whether the atoms that form a certain inch of bone should be the
+same as those which formed that bone when I died? All my life-time I
+never felt or thought of the existence of such a bone! On the other
+hand, I object to having the same worn muscles, the same shrivelled
+skin with which I may happen to die. Why give me the same body as that?
+Why not rather my youthful body, which was strong, and facile, and
+capable? The matter in the muscle of my arm at death would not serve to
+make half the muscle I had when young. But I thank God that St. Paul
+says it will _not_ be the same body. That body dies--up springs another
+body. I suspect myself that those are right who say that this body
+being the seed, the moment it dies in the soil of this world, that
+moment is the resurrection of the new body. The life in it rises out of
+it in a new body. This is not after it is put in the mere earth; for it
+is dead then, and the germ of life gone out of it. If a seed rots, no
+new body comes of it. The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.
+Dying and rotting are two very different things.--But I am not sure by
+any means. As I say, the whole question is rather uninteresting to me.
+What do I care about my old clothes after I have done with them? What
+is it to me to know what becomes of an old coat or an old pulpit gown?
+I have no such clinging to the flesh. It seems to me that people
+believe their bodies to be themselves, and are therefore very anxious
+about them--and no wonder then. Enough for me that I shall have eyes to
+see my friends, a face that they shall know me by, and a mouth to
+praise God withal. I leave the matter with one remark, that I am well
+content to rise as Jesus rose, however that was. For me the will of God
+is so good that I would rather have his will done than my own choice
+given me.
+
+"But I now come to the last, because infinitely the most important part
+of my subject--the resurrection for the sake of which all the other
+resurrections exist--the resurrection unto Life. This is the one of
+which St. Paul speaks in my text. This is the one I am most
+anxious--indeed, the only one I am anxious to set forth, and impress
+upon you.
+
+"Think, then, of all the deaths you know; the death of the night, when
+the sun is gone, when friend says not a word to friend, but both lie
+drowned and parted in the sea of sleep; the death of the year, when
+winter lies heavy on the graves of the children of summer, when the
+leafless trees moan in the blasts from the ocean, when the beasts even
+look dull and oppressed, when the children go about shivering with
+cold, when the poor and improvident are miserable with suffering or
+think of such a death of disease as befalls us at times, when the man
+who says, 'Would God it were morning!' changes but his word, and not
+his tune, when the morning comes, crying, 'Would God it were evening!'
+when what life is left is known to us only by suffering, and hope is
+amongst the things that were once and are no more--think of all these,
+think of them all together, and you will have but the dimmest, faintest
+picture of the death from which the resurrection of which I have now to
+speak, is the rising. I shrink from the attempt, knowing how weak words
+are to set forth _the_ death, set forth _the_ resurrection. Were I to
+sit down to yonder organ, and crash out the most horrible dissonances
+that ever took shape in sound, I should give you but a weak figure of
+this death; were I capable of drawing from many a row of pipes an
+exhalation of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, such as Milton
+himself could have invaded our ears withal, I could give you but a
+faint figure of this resurrection. Nevertheless, I must try what I can
+do in my own way.
+
+"If into the face of the dead body, lying on the bed, waiting for its
+burial, the soul of the man should begin to dawn again, drawing near
+from afar to look out once more at those eyes, to smile once again
+through those lips, the change on that face would be indeed great and
+wondrous, but nothing for marvel or greatness to that which passes on
+the countenance, the very outward bodily face of the man who wakes from
+his sleep, arises from the dead and receives light from Christ. Too
+often indeed, the reposeful look on the face of the dead body would be
+troubled, would vanish away at the revisiting of the restless ghost;
+but when a man's own right true mind, which God made in him, is
+restored to him again, and he wakes from the death of sin, then comes
+the repose without the death. It may take long for the new spirit to
+complete the visible change, but it begins at once, and will be
+perfected. The bloated look of self-indulgence passes away like the
+leprosy of Naaman, the cheek grows pure, the lips return to the smile
+of hope instead of the grin of greed, and the eyes that made innocence
+shrink and shudder with their yellow leer grow childlike and sweet and
+faithful. The mammon-eyes, hitherto fixed on the earth, are lifted to
+meet their kind; the lips that mumbled over figures and sums of gold
+learn to say words of grace and tenderness. The truculent, repellent,
+self-satisfied face begins to look thoughtful and doubtful, as if
+searching for some treasure of whose whereabouts it had no certain
+sign. The face anxious, wrinkled, peering, troubled, on whose lines you
+read the dread of hunger, poverty, and nakedness, thaws into a smile;
+the eyes reflect in courage the light of the Father's care, the back
+grows erect under its burden with the assurance that the hairs of its
+head are all numbered. But the face can with all its changes set but
+dimly forth the rising from the dead which passes within. The heart,
+which cared but for itself, becomes aware of surrounding thousands like
+itself, in the love and care of which it feels a dawning blessedness
+undreamt of before. From selfishness to love--is not this a rising from
+the dead? The man whose ambition declares that his way in the world
+would be to subject everything to his desires, to bring every human
+care, affection, power, and aspiration to his feet--such a world it
+would be, and such a king it would have, if individual ambition might
+work its will! if a man's opinion of himself could be made out in the
+world, degrading, compelling, oppressing, doing everything for his own
+glory!--and such a glory!--but a pang of light strikes this man to the
+heart; an arrow of truth, feathered with suffering and loss and dismay,
+finds out--the open joint in his armour, I was going to say--no, finds
+out the joint in the coffin where his heart lies festering in a death
+so dead that itself calls it life. He trembles, he awakes, he rises
+from the dead. No more he seeks the slavery of all: where can he find
+whom to serve? how can he become if but a threshold in the temple of
+Christ, where all serve all, and no man thinks first of himself? He to
+whom the mass of his fellows, as he massed them, was common and
+unclean, bows before every human sign of the presence of the making
+God. The sun, which was to him but a candle with which to search after
+his own ends, wealth, power, place, praise--the world, which was but
+the cavern where he thus searched--are now full of the mystery of
+loveliness, full of the truth of which sun and wind and land and sea
+are symbols and signs. From a withered old age of unbelief, the dim
+eyes of which refuse the glory of things a passage to the heart, he is
+raised up a child full of admiration, wonder, and gladness. Everything
+is glorious to him; he can believe, and therefore he sees. It is from
+the grave into the sunshine, from the night into the morning, from
+death into life. To come out of the ugly into the beautiful; out of the
+mean and selfish into the noble and loving; out of the paltry into the
+great; out of the false into the true; out of the filthy into the
+clean; out of the commonplace into the glorious; out of the corruption
+of disease into the fine vigour and gracious movements of health; in a
+word, out of evil into good--is not this a resurrection indeed--_the_
+resurrection of all, the resurrection of Life? God grant that with St.
+Paul we may attain to this resurrection of the dead.
+
+"This rising from the dead is often a long and a painful process. Even
+after he had preached the gospel to the Gentiles, and suffered much for
+the sake of his Master, Paul sees the resurrection of the dead towering
+grandly before him, not yet climbed, not yet attained unto--a
+mountainous splendour and marvel, still shining aloft in the air of
+existence, still, thank God, to be attained, but ever growing in height
+and beauty as, forgetting those things that are behind, he presses
+towards the mark, if by any means he may attain to the resurrection of
+the dead. Every blessed moment in which a man bethinks himself that he
+has been forgetting his high calling, and sends up to the Father a
+prayer for aid; every time a man resolves that what he has been doing
+he will do no more; every time that the love of God, or the feeling of
+the truth, rouses a man to look first up at the light, then down at the
+skirts of his own garments--that moment a divine resurrection is
+wrought in the earth. Yea, every time that a man passes from resentment
+to forgiveness, from cruelty to compassion, from hardness to
+tenderness, from indifference to carefulness, from selfishness to
+honesty, from honesty to generosity, from generosity to love,--a
+resurrection, the bursting of a fresh bud of life out of the grave of
+evil, gladdens the eye of the Father watching his children. Awake,
+then, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give
+thee light. As the harvest rises from the wintry earth, so rise thou up
+from the trials of this world a full ear in the harvest of Him who
+sowed thee in the soil that thou mightest rise above it. As the summer
+rises from the winter, so rise thou from the cares of eating and
+drinking and clothing into the fearless sunshine of confidence in the
+Father. As the morning rises out of the night, so rise thou from the
+darkness of ignorance to do the will of God in the daylight; and as a
+man feels that he is himself when he wakes from the troubled and
+grotesque visions of the night into the glory of the sunrise, even so
+wilt thou feel that then first thou knowest what thy life, the gladness
+of thy being, is. As from painful tossing in disease, rise into the
+health of well-being. As from the awful embrace of thy own dead body,
+burst forth in thy spiritual body. Arise thou, responsive to the
+indwelling will of the Father, even as thy body will respond to thy
+indwelling soul.
+
+  'White wings are crossing;
+  Glad waves are tossing;
+  The earth flames out in crimson and green:
+
+  Spring is appearing,
+  Summer is nearing--
+  Where hast thou been?
+
+  Down in some cavern,
+  Death's sleepy tavern,
+  Housing, carousing with spectres of night?
+  The trumpet is pealing
+  Sunshine and healing--
+  Spring to the light.'"
+
+With this quotation from a friend's poem, I closed my sermon, oppressed
+with a sense of failure; for ever the marvel of simple awaking, the
+mere type of the resurrection eluded all my efforts to fix it in words.
+I had to comfort myself with the thought that God is so strong that he
+can work even with our failures.
+
+
+
+END OF VOL. II.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2, by George MacDonald
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