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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers, by Mark
+Rutherford
+
+
+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: Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers
+       Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion
+
+
+Author: Mark Rutherford
+
+Release Date: April 2, 2005  [eBook #15525]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MIRIAM'S SCHOOLING AND OTHER
+PAPERS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+MIRIAM'S SCHOOLING AND OTHER PAPERS
+
+by
+
+MARK RUTHERFORD
+
+Edited by His Friend, Reuben Shapcott.
+
+London:
+Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner, & Co., Ltd.
+
+1890
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO STEPHEN WILLSHER.
+
+I dedicate this result of my editorial labours to you, because you
+were dear to our friend who is dead, and are almost the only person now
+alive, save myself, who knew him at the time these papers were written.
+A word of explanation is necessary with regard to the picture at the
+beginning of the book.  You will remember that Rutherford had in his
+possession a seal, which originally belonged to some early ancestor.
+It was engraved with a device to illustrate a sentence from Lilly.  The
+meaning given to the sentence was not exactly Livy's, but still it may
+very well be a little extended, and there is no doubt that the Roman
+would not have objected.  This seal, as you know, was much valued by
+Rutherford, and was curiously connected with certain events in his life
+which happened when Miriam was at school.  Nevertheless, it cannot
+anywhere be found.  It has been described, however, to Mr. Walter
+Crane, and he has reproduced it with singular accuracy.  It struck me,
+that although it has no direct relation with anything in the volume, it
+might be independently interesting, especially considering the part the
+motto played in Rutherford's history.
+
+R. S.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+GIDEON
+
+SAMUEL
+
+SAUL
+
+MIRIAM'S SCHOOLING
+
+MICHAEL TREVANION
+
+
+
+
+GIDEON.
+
+_The story which Jotham told his children on the day before his death
+concerning the achievements of his father Gideon--His comments and
+those of Time thereon._
+
+
+I am an old man, and I desire before I die to tell you more fully the
+achievements of your grandfather.  Strange that this day much that I
+had forgotten comes back to me clearly.
+
+During his youth the children of the East possessed the land for seven
+years because we had done evil.  We were driven to lodge in the caves
+of the mountains, so terrible was the oppression.  If we sowed corn,
+the harvest was not ours, for the enemy came over Jordan with the
+Midianites and the Amalekites and left nothing for us, taking away all
+our cattle and beasts of burden.  We cried unto God, and He sent a
+prophet to us, who told us that our trouble came upon us because of our
+sins, but otherwise he did nothing to help us.  One day your
+grandfather was threshing wheat, not near the threshing-floor, for the
+Midianites watched the threshing-floors to see if any corn was brought
+there, but close to the wine-press.  It was at Ophrah in Manasseh, the
+home of his father.  While he threshed, thinking upon all his troubles
+and the troubles of his country, not knowing if he could hide enough
+corn to save himself and his household from hunger and death, the angel
+of the Lord descended and sat under the oak.  He may have been there
+for some time before my father was aware of him, for my father was busy
+with his threshing, and his heart was sore.  At last he turned and saw
+the angel bright and terrible, and before he could speak the angel said
+to him, "The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour."  My father,
+as I have said, was threshing by the wine-press, on his guard even
+there lest he should be robbed or slain, and it seemed strange to him
+that the angel should say the Lord was with him.  So strange did it
+seem, that even before he fell down to worship, he turned and asked the
+seraph why, if the Lord was with him, all this mischief had befallen
+them, and where were all the miracles which the Lord wrought to save
+His people from the land of Egypt.  For there had been neither sign nor
+wonder for many years--nothing to show that the Lord cared for us more
+than He did for the heathen.  My father had thought much over all the
+deeds which the Lord had done for Israel; he had thought over the
+passage of the sea when Israel could not find any way open before them,
+and the very waves which were to overwhelm them rose like a wall and
+became their safeguard.  But he himself had seen nothing of this kind,
+and he almost doubted if the tales were true, and if times had not
+always been as they were then, all events happening alike to all, and
+hardly believing that God had ever appeared to man.
+
+The angel did not answer him, but looked him in the face, and said, "Go
+in this thy might, and thou shalt save Israel from the hand of the
+Midianites: have not I sent thee?"  My grandfather, Joash, was one of
+the poorest men of his tribe, and as for my father, nobody had ever
+thought anything of him, nor had he thought anything of himself.  _He_,
+a solitary labourer, unknown, with no friends, no arms; he to do what
+the princes could not do! he to lead these frightened slaves against
+soldiers who were as the sand for numbers!  It was not to be believed,
+and yet--there sat the angel.  It was broad noon; in the shade of the
+oak his light was like that of the sun.  It was not a dream of the
+night, and he could not be mistaken.  Nay, the angel's voice was more
+sharp and clear than the voice in which we speak to one another--a
+voice like the command of a king who must not be disobeyed.  Yet he
+comforted my father.  "Surely I will be with thee," he added, "and thou
+shalt smite the Midianites as one man."  If the Lord was to be with
+him, my father need not have hesitated, but in truth he did not care
+for the duty which was thrust upon him.  He would have been glad to do
+anything for his country which was within his power, but he did not
+feel equal to the task of leading it against its oppressors, nor did he
+covet it.  He would rather have endured in silence and died unknown
+than take such a weight upon his shoulders, for he was not one of those
+who desire power for power's sake.  The apparition, too, was so sudden.
+The angel was there with his divine face looking steadily at him, with
+eyes so piercing that no secret in the inmost soul could remain hidden
+from them, and the man upon whom they were turned could not even think
+without being sure that his thought was known.  Yet my father doubted,
+and this dread of the task imposed on him increased his doubt.  Yes; he
+doubted an order given him at midday by a messenger sitting in front of
+him flaming with heavenly colour.  It might after all be a delusion.
+He prayed, therefore, for a sign, and then as he prayed he thought he
+might be smitten for his presumption.  But the angel was tender to his
+misgivings, and said he would wait for the offering which was to test
+his authority.  My father went into the house and brought out a kid and
+unleavened bread, and presented it.  The angel directed him to put the
+flesh and the cake on the rock and pour out the broth.  He did so, and
+the angel then rose, and stretching out the staff that was in his hand,
+touched the flesh and cakes.  No sooner had he touched them
+than--wonder of wonders!--a fire leapt up out of the rock; they were
+consumed before his eyes, and the angel had departed.  A great terror
+overcame my father, for it had always been said that it was impossible
+for man to look upon a Spirit from the Lord and live.  He was left
+alone, too, with the message, but without the Comforter, and he cried
+unto God in despair, not knowing what to do.  As he cried, a word was
+spoken in his ear soft and sweet, like the voice of the aspen by the
+brook; soft and sweet, and yet so sure: "Peace be unto thee; fear not:
+thou shalt not die."  Then he rose and built an altar, to mark the
+sacred spot where God had talked with him and he had received his
+divine commission.  There it is to this day in Ophrah of the
+Abiezrites.  As you pass it, remember that where those stones now stand
+the Most High conversed with him whose blood is in your veins.
+
+As yet Gideon was without any direct orders, but that night he heard
+again the same soft, sweet voice, and it commanded him to build another
+altar upon the highest point of Ophrah, to throw down Baal's altar, and
+upon the altar to the Holy One to sacrifice the second of the bullocks
+belonging to Joash, the bullock of seven years old, burning it with the
+wood of the great idol.  The angel under the oak was before my father's
+eyes, the soft, sweet voice, telling him he should not die, was in his
+ears; but not even the Lord God can conquer our fears, and although my
+father was a brave man and saved Israel, no man ever had worse sinkings
+of heart than he.  It was as if he had more courage and more fear than
+his fellows.  He did what the Lord said unto him, but he was afraid to
+do it by day, for not only was his tribe against him, but his father's
+house also.  He took ten of his servants, and when the city awoke one
+morning the altar of Baal was cast down, the altar to the Lord God
+stood on the hill, and there lay on it the half-burnt logs of the image
+of Baal.  Our nation has never believed in Baal as it has believed in
+the Lord God.  How should it believe in Baal?  Baal has done nothing
+for it, but the Lord God brought us from Egypt through the desert, and
+was the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night.  Nevertheless,
+when the altar of Baal was cast down and the idol was destroyed the
+people demanded the death of Gideon, and you know that at this day,
+though Baal is a false god, and in their hearts they confess it, they
+would murder us if we said anything against him: they went therefore to
+Joash and told him to bring forth his son that they might slay him.
+These, my children, were not the Midianites nor the Amalekites, but our
+own nation.  At the very time when the heathen were upon us we turned
+from the Lord to Baal, and sought to destroy the man who could have
+rescued us.  Thus we have ever done, and we are surely a race accursed.
+But Joash secretly contemned Baal, although until now he had not
+ventured to say anything against him.  It made him bold to see how his
+son and his servants had over-thrown the altar and burnt the idol which
+lay there charred and unresisting.  He stood up before the altar, and
+facing the mob which howled at him; asked them why they should take
+upon themselves to plead for Baal: "If he be a god, let him plead for
+himself, because one hath cast down his altar."  The charred logs never
+stirred; there was no sound in the sky; Joash was not struck dead; Baal
+was proved to be nothing.  That was a sight to see that morning: the
+ashes smouldering in the sunlight, the raging crowd, Gideon and his
+fellows behind Joash, and Joash calling on Baal to avenge himself if he
+was a god as his worshippers pretended.  Ah, if that had been Jehovah's
+altar!  When Nadab and Abihu offered strange fire before the Lord, fire
+came down from the Lord and devoured them.  When Miriam spoke against
+His servant she became a leper; and when Korah, Dathan, and Abiram
+blasphemed, they were swallowed up in the pit.  But Baal could not move
+a breath of heaven on his behalf.  What kind of a god is he?  A god who
+cannot punish those who insult him is but a word.
+
+As for Gideon, he grew in strength.  Nothing happened to him because he
+had thus dared Baal.  He went about his work daily; no judgment fell on
+him, and nobody dared to meddle with him.
+
+Soon afterwards the Midianites and Amalekites, who had withdrawn for a
+while, overspread the land again, and pitched in the valley of Jezreel.
+Gideon having suffered nothing for his insult to Baal, had become
+bolder.  Moreover, his tribe, the Abiezrites, had seen that he had
+suffered nothing.  Thus it came to pass that when the Spirit of the
+Lord came upon him; and he blew a trumpet, all Abiezer followed him.
+Not only so; he sent messengers through Manasseh, Asher, Zebulun, and
+Naphtali, and they came up to meet him, the very people who a few
+months before would have stoned him.  They thronged after him, and now
+professed themselves believers in Jehovah.  They were not hypocrites.
+They really believed now, after a fashion, that Baal could not help
+them.  Their fault was that they believed one thing one day and another
+thing the next.  That has always been the fault of the people.  Your
+grandfather did not despise them for their instability.  So far as they
+were not stable to Baal it was good, and he pitied them as they flocked
+to his standard, hoping that he could deliver them.  He blew the
+trumpet, and at the simple blast of that trumpet in each village and
+town the nation seemed to rise as one man, such strength was there in
+its tones.  These men had been idolaters, and it might have been
+thought that to turn them all would have taken years of persuasion; but
+no, at the simple sound of the trumpet the religion of Baal vanished.
+
+Gideon was now at the head of a great host; he had been favoured with
+visions from the Most High; the angel of the Lord had appeared to him;
+he had burnt the image; and yet now, when the army was round him, fear
+fell upon him again, and he doubted if he could save Israel, or if God
+would keep His promise.  So it always was with him, as I have already
+said.  He therefore prayed for another sign, and the Lord did not
+rebuke him, as a man would have done if his promise had been
+mistrusted.  Gideon's test was strange; he did not pray that he might
+see the angel again, for the thoughts that came into his mind were
+always strange, not like those of other men, and were unaccountable
+even to himself.  That night the fleece of wool on the ground was wet
+and the earth was dry.  He prayed yet again, and still God was tender
+to him, for He knows the weakness of the creatures He has made.  This
+time the fleece was dry and the earth was wet, and Gideon thereupon
+rose up early with all the host, and moved towards the host of Midian,
+till he came in sight of them as they lay in the valley by the hill of
+Moreh.
+
+But the Lord would not have so many to do His work, and most of them
+were afraid and useless.  He therefore commanded Gideon to send away
+all who were frightened, and ten thousand only were left.  These ten
+thousand were still too many, for most of them were impatient, not able
+to restrain themselves, and likely to fail, either through fear or
+foolhardiness, in the stratagem the Lord designed.  He therefore
+commanded Gideon, when they were all thirsty, to bring them down to the
+water.  Nine thousand seven hundred were in such a hurry to reach it
+that they dropped on their knees to drink, but three hundred were
+collected and patient, and were content to lift their hands to their
+mouths.  The three hundred were kept and the rest sent home.  That
+night God, the ever merciful, had promised Gideon to deliver the
+Midianites into His servant's hands, and had confirmed His promise by
+miracle, but nevertheless He directed Gideon to go down to the camp, so
+that he might hear a man's dream and its interpretation, and be further
+strengthened in his faith.  Gideon went down and listened at a tent
+door; and when the dream was told, how a cake of barley bread tumbled
+into the host of Midian, and came unto a tent and smote it that it
+fell, all fear departed, and he rose up and went back to the three
+hundred, and cried to them, "Arise; for the Lord hath delivered into
+your hand the host of Midian."
+
+Forthwith he divided his three hundred into three bands, and each man
+took an empty pitcher and placed a torch inside it.  In the dead of the
+night they marched to the camp, this little three hundred, and placed
+themselves round it.  Then Gideon broke his pitcher and showed his
+torch, and all the others did likewise, and shouted, "The sword of the
+Lord, and of Gideon."
+
+The host cried and fled, for a terror from the Lord descended on them,
+and turned their own swords against them.  When they were defeated all
+Israel went out after them, and there was great slaughter, and Oreb and
+Zeeb, two princes of Midian, were slain.
+
+As soon as the victory was achieved, and while he was yet in pursuit,
+the men of Ephraim turned upon him and abused him because he had not
+taken them with him to fight the battle against the Midianites, but
+never had they lifted a finger to save themselves before Gideon
+appeared.  When, however, he had caught and destroyed Zebah and
+Zalmunna, the two Midianitish kings, and had chastised Succoth and
+beaten down the tower of Penuel, Israel came to him and asked him to
+rule over them, but he would not.  He cared not to be king.  He
+remembered with what difficulty he had believed the angel and the
+promise, the sickly faintness which had overcome him on that night
+before the Midianitish overthrow.  Whatever he had done had not been
+his doing, but the Lord's; and how did he know that the Lord's help
+would continue?  The thought of being king, and of having a set office,
+perhaps without the Lord's assistance, was too much for him.  He was
+right in his refusal.  He was one of those men who can do much if left
+to themselves, and if they are supported by the Most High, but who
+shrink and tremble when something is expected from them.  "The Lord
+shall be your King," he said.  He trusted that God would speak to the
+nation as He had spoken to him, and without any leader would guide them
+aright.  That is not the Lord's way.  But though Gideon would not be
+king, he desired some honour, and he asked that he might have the
+ear-rings of the Midianites who had fallen.  Therewith he made an
+image, a thing forbidden.  It stood in his house, a record of what the
+Lord had done for him; and yet this very record became a snare, and
+Israel fell to worshipping it, and Jehovah was displaced by the
+testimony of His own love for us.
+
+Your grandfather is now dead.  Abimelech reigns in his place, and has
+slain all the children of Gideon save myself.  Israel has returned to
+Baal; its strength has departed; before long we shall be subdued under
+the Philistines.  Excepting in our own house, there are none that have
+not gone a-whoring after Baal; the memory of the battle by the hill
+Moreh is clean forgotten; and soon the memory of my father will also
+disappear, and it will be as if he had never lived.  To think that the
+vision of the angel in Ophrah and the night in the valley of Jezreel
+should end in nothing!
+
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+That night Jotham died.
+
+
+_Fourteen Hundred Tears Later_.
+
+"The time would fail me to tell of Gideon, . . . who through
+faith . . . out of weakness was made strong, waxed valiant in fight,
+turned to flight the armies of the aliens."--_Epistle to the Hebrews_.
+
+_Three Thousand Years Later_.
+
+"'The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon,' answered Balfour as he parried
+and returned the blow."--_Old Mortality_.
+
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL.
+
+_Samuel immediately before his death spoke thus at Bamah:--_
+
+I am now old, and before many days are past I shall be gathered to my
+fathers.  Behold, here I am: witness against me before the Lord: Whose
+ox have I taken? or whose ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded?
+whom have I oppressed? or of whose hand have I received any bribe to
+blind mine eyes therewith, and I will restore it you.  How could it be
+that I could be other than that which I have been, seeing that from my
+childhood upwards I have been the chosen of the Lord, the instrument to
+do His bidding?
+
+There are none of you who remember the evil days of Eli.  Many times
+before then your fathers went astray after false gods, but when Eli was
+high priest the Tabernacle itself was profaned by his sons, the sons of
+Belial; for they robbed the people of their meat which they brought for
+the sacrifice, so that men abhorred the offering, and they lay with
+loose women at the door of the Tabernacle, after the manner of those
+who worship the gods of the heathen.  To turn aside from the Lord and
+serve these gods is wickedness, but to serve them in the presence of
+the Ark, and to defile the sanctuary itself, was an abomination worse
+than any in Ashdod or Gaza.  The Lord might assuredly have left Israel
+to the Philistines, but He desired that there should be a people
+preserved to do honour to His name, and He called me, called me even as
+a child, and to Him have I been dedicate.  What I have said and done
+has not been mine but His, and if any have any fault to find, they must
+find it with Him and not with me.
+
+My father, Elkanah, was one of the faithful in Israel, and he went up
+yearly to Shiloh; my mother, Hannah, was his beloved wife, though it
+was Peninnah who had given him children.  I was born in answer to a
+prayer which my mother prayed in bitterness of soul, and she vowed that
+if she should have a man child he should be the Lord's all the days of
+his life; no razor should come upon his head, neither should he drink
+strong drink.  My mother redeemed her vow, and I was taken to Shiloh,
+and there I ministered before the Lord.  I lived in the midst of the
+iniquity which was wrought by the sons of Eli; but although a youth,
+the vow which my mother had made for me protected me.  The Lord had
+then withdrawn Himself from Israel, and no word had been spoken to us
+by Him for years, save a message from a prophet who prophesied the fall
+of Eli and his house.  Still I served, although He gave no sign of His
+presence, for my mother visited me continually, and she kept me strong
+and pure.  One night, when I had lain down to sleep, I suddenly heard a
+voice, which I took to be the voice of Eli, and it called me by name.
+This it did thrice, and each time I went to Eli and asked him what he
+wished with me, but he had not called.  When the voice had come again
+and again, I answered, "Speak; for Thy servant heareth," and then for
+the first time was I bidden to execute a command from the Lord; and I,
+Samuel, a boy, was ordered to tell Eli, the high priest from the Lord,
+whose minister he was, that a deed was about to be done which should
+make tingle the ears of every one who heard it, and that for the
+iniquity of his sons, and because he did not restrain them, no
+sacrifice should avail to protect him from judgment.  Such was the
+message given to me; to me, Samuel the child, and thus was I honoured
+even then.  I had never heard the voice before that night, and I lay
+awake till the morning, fearing to tell Eli what had been said to me,
+and I went out and opened the doors.  But Eli sent for me, and when he
+saw me he perceived that the Lord had been with me, and he directed me
+to hide nothing from him of what had been said to me.  I told him the
+vision every whit, and from that day forth I have been at the Lord's
+bidding, and have interpreted His will to Israel.
+
+Although I had never heard the Lord's voice before, and it came with no
+sign nor miracle, I did not doubt that it was His, for there was that
+in it which proclaimed Him.  Nevertheless I wondered what His judgment
+would be, and in what manner it would come to pass.  Soon afterwards
+the Israelites went out to battle against the Philistines in Aphek, and
+were smitten with great slaughter.  Then the elders of Israel, thinking
+that the Ark of the covenant would save them, sent to Shiloh and
+brought it thence, and when it came into the camp they all shouted with
+a great shout, so that the earth rang again.  Fools to believe that the
+Ark was anything if the Living God was not with it!  When He was with
+it, and the men of Bethshemesh did but look at it, they died; but
+without Him it is nothing.  The Israelites were greatly heartened when
+the Ark came, and the Philistines were afraid, believing, idolaters as
+they were, that God must be in it.  But the Israelites were defeated;
+thirty thousand of them fell; the very Ark was taken; Hophni and
+Phinehas were also slain.  When Eli heard the news he fell backward and
+died, and his daughter-in-law, who was in travail, died also.  Thus was
+the word delivered to me fulfilled suddenly in one day, and for the
+sins of the priests even the Ark whereon were the cherubim was
+permitted to depart to the Philistines and keep company with Dagon.
+After that day, when Eli died and I looked into the empty sanctuary,
+could I hesitate to believe and obey the Lord's word?
+
+The Lord had no mind that the Philistines, who were His scourge for the
+Israelites, should vaunt themselves over Him, or should believe that of
+their own strength they had prevailed.  Wonderful is He!  He takes the
+wicked to punish His people, and the wicked are but tools in His hand,
+and He uses them for His own designs.  The Ark came to Ashdod, and was
+put in the house of Dagon; but when the men of Ashdod arose early on
+the morrow, behold Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before
+the Ark.  They took Dagon and set him in his place again; and when they
+arose early on the morrow morning, behold Dagon was fallen upon his
+face to the ground before the Ark, and the head of Dagon and both the
+palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold.  Furthermore, the
+men of Ashdod were destroyed with a secret and dreadful disease.  They
+thereupon determined to get rid of the Ark, and they sent it to Gath.
+When it came to Gath the pestilence fell upon the men of Gath also, and
+they sent it away to Ekron, and the pestilence fell also upon the men
+of Ekron.  Then the wise men of the Philistines were called together,
+and they counselled that the Ark should be returned with a
+trespass-offering to Israel, and that it should be carried in a new
+cart by two milch kine on which there had come no yoke, and that their
+calves should be brought home from them.  Then if the kine of their own
+accord took the cart to Bethshemesh, it would be known that it was the
+God of Israel who had plagued the land; but if they refused to go, then
+it might be chance which had done it.  The Ark was placed in the cart,
+and the Spirit of the Lord came upon the kine.  Remembering their
+calves, they nevertheless went straight along the road to Bethshemesh,
+lowing as they went, and turning not aside to the right hand or to the
+left, and the lords of the Philistines went after them unto the border
+of Bethshemesh.  The men of Bethshemesh were reaping their wheat
+harvest in the valley, and they lifted up their eyes, and saw the Ark,
+and rejoiced to see it, and the cart came into the field of Joshua the
+Bethshemite, and stood there, where there was a great stone, and they
+clave the wood of the cart, and offered the kine as a burnt-offering.
+And the Levites took down the Ark, and the coffer that was with it,
+wherein the jewels of stone were, and put them on the great stone, and
+the men of Bethshemesh offered burnt offering and sacrifices.  When the
+Philistines had seen all these things, and when they knew that the
+plague in their land was stayed, did they acknowledge the Lord God?
+How should they, seeing that they were not His elect?
+
+The children of Israel continually turned aside to the lewd gods of the
+heathen, and at times it seemed as if the whole earth would be given up
+to the abominations of the Canaanites.  The Lord had brought us out of
+Egypt, and through the desert.  He had appeared to us on Sinai, and had
+given us His commandments, by which alone we could live.  He had
+revealed unto us that we should be pure, and separate ourselves from
+the filth around us.  He had roused up Moses, and Joshua, and the
+Judges, all of whom strove to preserve and ever build higher and
+stronger the wall which was to protect us, so that the sacred Law and
+the service of the one God might continue.  Israel was but a handful in
+the midst of Philistines and Amalekites, nations which worshipped Baal
+with fornication and all kinds of uncleanness, and Israel was ever at
+the point of mingling with them.  Then it would have been forgotten as
+they will be forgotten; but if it will only abide in the Law, as given
+in thunder and lightning in the wilderness, it will be great, when,
+except for their struggles with Israel, the recollection of Amalekite
+and Philistine shall have perished.
+
+I often was alone amidst a people which had well nigh all gone astray,
+but I remembered the voice which I heard in the Temple when I was a
+child.  I sought the Most High day and night, and He came very close to
+me, and it became clearer and clearer to me that all things were as
+nothing compared with the Law, and that everything was to be set aside
+for its sake.  Alone, I say, I testified on His behalf, but He kept me.
+Neither women nor wine have I ever known when men were given over to
+women and wine: His Vision has filled me, dedicate to Him ere I was
+born.
+
+The Lord chastised Israel through their enemies, and I besought the
+people to turn away from the Philistine gods and their iniquities.  I
+gathered them together in Mizpeh: the Philistines heard of it, and came
+down upon Mizpeh, thinking that now they could wipe us out from the
+face of the earth.  Kings have had their captains, but I had none, and
+was not a man of war; the people were in a panic; their lascivious
+idolatry of Baal had destroyed their strength, and the enemy lay
+opposite us.  That night I did not sleep, but went to the Lord in
+prayer.  If I had had nothing but my own strength which I could trust I
+should have fainted, for what could I, unlearned in battle, do against
+such an army, and with no soldiers save a frightened mob, which knew
+that it deserved God's wrath.  I wrestled with the Most High as Jacob
+wrestled, and I implored Him to remember His promise to our fathers.  I
+called to mind that day by the borders of the sea, when His angel which
+went before the camp of the Israelites removed and went behind them,
+and the pillar of the cloud went from before their face and stood
+behind them, and how the waters were a wall on the right hand and on
+the left, and in the morning watch the Lord looked unto the host of the
+Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the cloud, and troubled the
+host of the Egyptians.  I called to mind the night when Gideon and his
+three hundred stood round the Midianites, and the Lord set every man's
+sword against his fellow, even throughout all the host.  I called to
+mind the voice which spoke to me when as a child I lay on my bed in the
+Lord's House.  As I communed and wrestled, the tent was filled with
+light, brighter than that of the sun at noon.  No word was spoken, but
+I knew it was the light of Him whom to see is death, but whose light is
+life.  All fear departed, and as the glory slowly waned, sleep overcame
+me--sleep like that of an infant; and when the morning dawned, and I
+opened the doors of my tent and watched the sun rise, I was strong with
+the strength of ten thousand men, and rejoiced, although the
+Philistines were like the sand on the seashore for multitude.  I caused
+the trumpet to sound, and brought Israel together.  On the hill there
+in Mizpeh, in sight of the people who stood round trembling, I builded
+an altar and slew a lamb, and offered it as a sacrifice to Him who had
+appeared unto me.  I prayed again, for as the smoke of the
+burnt-offering rose in the clear air, the Philistines came up the hill
+to battle with us, and the people cried, and were on the point of
+fleeing this way and that way, to be pursued and slain.  I commanded
+them to be still.  The Philistines drew nearer and nearer, and I prayed
+ever more and more earnestly.  The smoke of the offering was beginning
+to die down, and yet I prayed.  The fire was well nigh out to the last
+spark, and for a moment I doubted, forgetful of the vision, for the
+music of the army of Dagon could now be heard.  Suddenly the fire
+flamed up on high from the grey ashes, as if a heap of the driest wood
+of summer had been thrown on it, and I saw a little cloud gather on the
+other side of the Philistine hosts, and I knew that my prayer was
+answered.  The flame dropped instantly, but the cloud spread itself
+even as I looked, and the wind arose, and hither and thither across the
+cloud flashed the lightning.  Onward it came till it rested over the
+Philistines, and then it broke and descended on them, and they were
+shut out from us in thick darkness.  The thunder of the Lord crashed
+and rolled, and we saw His lightnings pierce down like swords.  Silent
+we stood, and presently the cloud lifted, and the Philistines, who, a
+few minutes before, marched against us in order, were a confused mass,
+struggling hither and thither, and many of them were lying dead on the
+ground.  Then, with one accord, Israel shouted, and ran and smote the
+Philistines until they came under Bethcar.  I went not with them; but
+when they had all departed, I took a stone and set it up between Mizpeh
+and Shen, and wrote on it Ebenezer, for hitherto had the Lord helped
+us--the Lord, I say, and never a man, as it was the Lord and never a
+man who has helped us since we left Egypt.
+
+After that defeat the Philistines troubled us no more, and the cities
+which they had taken from us were restored; but when I became old, the
+people grew restless, and desired a change.  The Lord, to humble me,
+and prevent boasting by His servant, had afflicted me with two sons,
+who obeyed not His commandments; and the people put forward these two
+sons, who were judges under me, as a reason why a king should be given
+them.  If, however, my sons did injustice, I was still alive to whom
+appeal could be made, and why should a king, because he was a king, be
+better?  The Lord had brought us out of Egypt, and had ruled us through
+His ministers.  We had no court, with women and with splendour; and
+those who won our battles lived like those whom they led.  Our gold and
+our silver were saved for the House of the Lord, which was His, and for
+all of us.  The office of king was foreign to us: it was heathen and
+hateful to me.  None more earnestly than I worshipped the Lord, and
+submitted myself to His direction, and imposed His will even to death
+upon the people.  But that a man, because he was called king, should
+rule, and send the people hither and thither for his own ends, and
+slaughter them, was horrible to me.  I sought the Lord in prayer to
+know how I should meet this request, and He counselled me to yield.
+
+I assembled the people together, and rehearsed unto them all that had
+been done for them without the help of a king.  I foretold to them that
+the king would be for himself, and not for them--that he would press
+their sons and daughters into his service; but the people would not
+listen to me.  The Lord had said unto me that they had not rejected me,
+but rejected Him that He should not reign over them, as they had ever
+done since the day when they were brought up out of Egypt.  I cared
+not, however, for their rejection of me, but because it was He who was
+rejected.  I thought over it night and day, and it well nigh broke my
+heart.
+
+Those who had hitherto been placed over us had not been chosen because
+they were the sons of the rich, or of those who were chosen before
+them.  Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Jephthah, were all of them select of the
+Lord from the people.  Nay, even a woman had been taken to judge
+Israel--Deborah the prophetess, who dwelt under the palm-tree here
+between Ramah and Bethel.  It was Deborah who sent for Barak to lead
+the host against Sisera, and Barak said to her that if she went he
+would go, but if she went not he would not go, so mighty was her
+presence.  Sisera gathered together his army and all his chariots, nine
+hundred chariots of iron; but Deborah spoke a word in the ears of
+Barak, when he was afraid, and Sisera was discomfited with all his
+chariots and his host.  He fled, and it was a woman, Jael, the wife of
+Heber, who slew him--for ever honoured be her name.  In the days of
+Shamgar, the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were
+unoccupied, and the travellers walked through byeways; the rulers
+ceased in Israel; the people chose new gods; there was war in the
+gates; there was no shield or spear seen among forty thousand in Israel
+until Deborah arose.  The family of Gideon also was the poorest in
+Manasseh, and yet it was to him that the angel was sent, and he subdued
+the Midianites and the children of the East.  This hitherto had been
+the Lord's way with us; and now we were to abandon Him for a king,
+whose children, because they were king's children, were to be our
+commanders.  It well nigh broke my heart, I say.  The glory of the
+Tabernacle was henceforth to be dim, overshadowed by the pomp of a
+monarch.  I could not endure it, and again I went to the Lord, and
+besought Him to turn the people or visit them with the thunder and
+lightning of Mizpeh, that they might repent of their iniquity and live.
+But He would not speak to them beyond what He had spoken through me,
+and I returned and sent the assembly away, every man to his own city.
+
+I called the people together in Mizpeh again, the place where they had
+seen the Lord save them Himself, and yet even there they would not
+yield.  Then I prophesied against them, because they had cast aside Him
+who had delivered them out of all their adversities and tribulations;
+and I caused all their tribes to assemble before me.  Saul the son of
+Kish was taken, and the fools shouted God save the king.  I did my best
+for them.  I wrote laws for them to protect them against him, and I put
+them in a book and laid them up in the sanctuary.
+
+Henceforth I was in a measure more solitary than before.  Saul was a
+brave man, and led the people to war, and they were pleased with his
+success, but he was not single in his service of the Lord, and he had
+for a wife a Horite, one Rizpah, who worshipped false gods.  He
+believed he could make Israel a nation by battles, and he saw not what
+I saw--that the one thing necessary for our salvation was to keep
+ourselves pure and separate.  The people complained that the Law was a
+burden, but it was their safeguard: it was the Law which marked them
+off from the heathen, who were doomed to fall by their sins.  I toiled
+daily to preserve the Law, and to insist upon the observance of its
+ceremonies, knowing full well that if the people let them go, they
+would let go the commandments from Sinai; would let go the sobriety and
+the chastity of their bodies; would mix in the worship of Baal, and be
+lost.  Saul was no observer of ceremonies, and considered them naught,
+the idiot, who forgot that they were ordained of God, with whom there
+is no small nor great, and that through them the people are taught.
+More solitary than ever I was, I say; but I sought the Lord more than
+ever, and kept closer to me the memory of the Voice which first called
+me.  If Israel is to live, it will not be because Saul overcame the
+Amalekites and Philistines, but because the Lamp of God in my hands has
+not been extinguished.  When the Philistines came against us at
+Michmash, Saul was in Gilgal, and I went to meet him there.  Because I
+came not at the time appointed, he, the impious one, took upon himself
+to offer the sacrifice, pleading that the people were leaving him, and
+that the Philistines were encamped against him.  He forgot the thunder
+and lightning at Mizpeh, and that it was his duty to obey the least
+word of the Lord, whatever might happen.  It was a surer way to save
+Israel than to teach it by the king's example that the ordinances of
+the Lord could be set aside because it was convenient.  I cared not for
+myself: how can he who is His messenger care for aught save His honour?
+But I saw by this act of Saul what was in him--that it was an example
+of his heart--that if he could conquer the Philistines he cared not for
+the Law.  His victories without the Law would have melted away like
+snow in summer.  They would have been as the victories of Philistines
+over Amalekites, or Amalekites over Philistines.  It was one of the
+first things he did after becoming king, and the Spirit of the Lord
+came upon me, and I denounced him, and was directed to seek a successor
+outside his house.  If the kingdom had remained in the house of Saul,
+Israel would have become a heathen tribe, and it was not for this that
+God called it out of Egypt and led it through the Red Sea.
+
+I was commanded to send Saul against the Amalekites.  What Amalek did
+to us when we came out of Egypt had been written down, and the
+direction concerning him.  He met us by the way, and smote the hindmost
+of us, even all that were feeble, when we were faint and weary; and it
+had been said to our fathers that when we had rest from our enemies
+round about us, we were to blot out the remembrance of Amalek from
+under heaven--"_Thou shalt not forget it_" was the word delivered to
+us.  I had the record of the battle in Rephidim when Joshua discomfited
+Amalek, not in his own strength, but in the strength of the uplifted
+arms of the aged Moses, the man of God.  His arms, withered and feeble,
+defeated Amalek that day.  Does not the altar still stand,
+Jehovah-nissi, to testify that we should war with Amalek from
+generation to generation?  Furthermore, Amalek feared not God, but
+worshipped strange gods with abominable rites, after which the sons and
+daughters of Israel lusted.  It was the Lord's desire that we should
+root up Amalek, as a man roots up a weed, and fears to leave a thread
+of it in the ground, lest it should again grow.
+
+Saul was willing to arm himself against the Amalekites, and to do his
+best to defeat them after the manner of a king, and to bring them into
+subjection; but he saw not with my eyes, and knew not what a Law of the
+Lord was.  Therein have I stood apart from Saul and his friends and
+this nation.  They also were not ignorant of the Law, but they thought
+it could be observed like the laws of men, not understanding that it is
+binding to the last jot and tittle, and that if a man fails at the last
+jot or tittle, he fails altogether.
+
+Saul smote the Amalekites, and everything that was vile and refuse he
+utterly destroyed with the edge of the sword, but he spared Agag and
+the best of the spoil; and when he came to meet me, he saluted me, and
+said he had performed the commandment of the Lord.  His commandments
+are not thus to be performed, and I asked him what meant then the
+bleating of the sheep and the lowing of the oxen.  He had reserved
+them, he said, as a sacrifice.  I asked him whether the Lord had as
+great delight in burnt-offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice
+of the Lord, I told him that to obey is better than sacrifice, and to
+hearken than the fat of rams; and I denounced him there, and foretold
+that his kingdom should be given to a neighbour better than he.  He was
+then greatly afraid, for although he feared not the Lord, and was brave
+before his enemies, he was at times much given to secret terror, and he
+besought me to stay with him and pardon him.  But I would not, and when
+I had worshipped, I ordered Agag to be brought before me.  He came
+trembling and asking for mercy, but I hewed him in pieces.  Mercy?
+Mercy to whom?  Would it have been mercy to Israel to let him live and
+become a leader of the Amalekites against us?  Moreover, a clear
+command had been given me, and was set plainly before me, as a candle
+in front of me in darkness, to which I was to walk, swerving not a
+hair's breadth, that the Amalekite was to be destroyed utterly; and
+always when the Light was before me I strove to reach it, never looking
+this way nor that way.  Before Saul also the Light was set, but he went
+aside, thinking he could come to it if he bent his path and compassed
+other things, not knowing that the track is very narrow, and that if we
+diverge therefrom and take our eyes off the Light we are lost.  Who was
+Agag, that I should show any tenderness to him, a foul worshipper of
+false gods?  I rejoiced when he lay bound for the knife in the agony of
+death, and his blood was a sacrifice with which God was well pleased.
+
+David now waits until Saul's death, for the king is still a strength in
+Israel.  I fear that David will dishonour himself with grievous sin,
+for he is a lover of women, and a man of words and of song: treacherous
+is he also at times.  But he belongs to us; he fears the Lord and His
+prophets and priests; he may go a-whoring, but it will not be after
+Baal; he will war against the heathen, and will not show mercy to them.
+Now I am about to die, and to descend into the darkness whither my
+fathers, and Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses have gone before me.  I
+bless the Lord that I have lived, for I have preserved the knowledge of
+Him and His Law.  My life ends, but the Lord liveth, all honour and
+glory to His sacred name.
+
+
+
+
+SAUL.
+
+_Rizpah, the Horite, in her old age, talks of Saul to the wife of
+Armoni, her son_.
+
+This is the day on which your husband's father fell on the mountains of
+Gilboa.  Though I was no Israelite, but born in the desert, I was his
+beloved before he became king.  I am eighty years old now, but the
+blood moves in me, and I grow warm as I think of him.  There was not a
+goodlier person than he--from his shoulders and upwards he was higher
+than any of the people.  Why did the Lord choose him?  He never coveted
+that honour, and he suffered because there was laid on him that which
+he did not seek.  Yet the Lord was right, for there was not one in all
+Israel so royal as he, and it was he who redeemed it and made it a
+nation.  Samuel had grown old--he was always a priest rather than a
+captain--and his sons, whom he made judges, turned aside after lucre,
+took bribes, and perverted judgment.  The people were weary of their
+oppression and the hand of the Amalekites and the Philistines were very
+heavy on the land.  They therefore prayed for a king, and the thing
+displeased Samuel, and he tried to turn them from it.  But they refused
+to listen to him, and when they came together at Mizpeh, Saul was the
+man upon whom the lot fell.  Again, I say, he desired not to be king.
+He had hidden himself on that day, but he could not be hidden, and he
+was dragged forth to glory and to ruin.  I was there: I heard the
+shouts as they cried God save the king.  I saw him no more that day,
+for the tumult was great, and there was much for him to do.  But that
+evening he came back to me at Gibeah; he, my Saul, came to me as
+anointed king.  O that night! never to be forgotten, were I to live a
+thousand years, when I held the king in my arms!  Never--no, not even
+on the night when I first became his--had I known such delight.  I have
+seen more misery than has fallen to the lot of any woman in this land,
+and it has not passed over me senseless.  I am not one of those who can
+go through misfortune untouched, as a drop of oil can rise through
+water.  I have taken it all in, felt it all, to the last sting there
+was in it; and yet now, when I call to mind the night after he was
+crowned, and its rapture of an hour--the strength and the eagerness of
+his love: the strength, the eagerness, and the pride of mine--I say it
+is good that I have lived.  The next morning I saw him with his valiant
+men--the men whose heart God had touched; how he set them in order, and
+how they followed him--him higher than any of them, from the shoulders
+upwards; and I said to myself, he is mine, the king is mine, that body
+of his is mine, and I am his.
+
+Tell you all about him?  How can I?  But I will tell you a little--what
+I have told you again and again before--so that you may tell it to your
+children, and the name of Saul may never be forgotten.
+
+After he was chosen, the children of Belial said, How shall this man
+save us?  But he held his peace, for he foresaw what was at hand,
+Nahash the Ammonite came up and encamped against Jabesh-gilead; and
+when the men of Jabesh-gilead offered to become his slaves if he would
+but make a covenant with them, he consented, but upon this condition,
+that they should thrust out their right eyes.  Such thralls had the
+children of Israel become whom Saul had to save, that Nahash dared to
+put this upon them in mockery.  They sent messengers to Gibeah, where
+Saul was--not to him, but to tell the people there; and Saul heard the
+message as he drove the herd out of the field after work, for he was
+still at his farm, his day not yet having come.  When he listened to
+the story of the men of Jabesh-gilead, the Spirit of God came upon him;
+and he took a yoke of his oxen and hewed them in pieces, and sent them
+throughout all the coasts of Israel, saying, Whosoever cometh not after
+Saul, and after Samuel, so shall it be done unto his oxen.  The fear of
+the Lord fell on the people, such strength was there in Saul's command,
+and they came out with one consent.  He numbered his men, divided them
+into three bands, marched all night from Bezek, fell upon the Ammonites
+in the morning watch, and so slaughtered and scattered them that two of
+them were not left together.  Where now were the men of Belial who had
+mocked him?  The people cried out that they might be brought forth and
+put to death; but Saul, ever noble and great of heart, forbade it.
+"Not a man," he said, "shall be put to death this day, for to-day the
+Lord hath wrought salvation in Israel."
+
+The Philistines had for a long time oppressed the land, so that men who
+were their neighbours hid themselves in caves, thickets, and rocks.
+They were not armed, for the Philistines had forbidden the working of
+iron, lest their slaves should have anything wherewith they might
+defend themselves.  Having defeated the Ammonites, Saul went up to
+Gilgal, and a great crowd came after him trembling.  He waited there
+seven days for Samuel, and meanwhile the people began to slip away from
+him.  What was he to do?  He could wait no longer, and he commanded the
+burnt-offering to be brought to him.  Just as he had made an end of the
+sacrifice, Samuel appeared, and Saul went out to meet him and take his
+blessing.  But Samuel turned upon him and doomed him, because he had
+meddled with the priest's office.  He was to be cast out from his
+kingship, and another was chosen in his place.  That was the root of
+all my lord's trouble, as we shall afterwards see--the seed of the
+madness which made his life worse than death.  What had he done?
+Nothing, but set fire to that miserable beast.  Had he slain a man, or
+robbed the widow or the fatherless, or defrauded those who came to him
+for judgment, his punishment would have been just; but that he should
+be deposed because, in his extremity against the Lord's enemies, he had
+taken upon him to do what Samuel neglected to do, was a strange
+sentence from the Lord.  Would you or I deal so with our friends? would
+we give them no place for repentance? would we let the penalty endure
+when, the heart is changed and forgiveness is sought?  The Lord's ways
+are wonderful.  But it was Samuel's doing.  If it had not been for
+Samuel, the Lord would have shown mercy.  Samuel was ever the priest,
+and had no compassion in him.  He had been chosen as a child, and he
+never forgot he was the Lord's selected servant.  He hated Saul because
+Saul was king, and he loved to show his power over him.  Before that
+day in Gilgal, he had called down thunder and lightning from heaven to
+show that Jehovah listened to him, and to prove that Jehovah resented
+the request that the people should have some one to command them other
+than the sons of Eli.  He hated Saul because the people obeyed him and
+fled to him when they were in danger.  Who could help obeying him; who
+was there who knew him who did not love to obey?  However, he was
+cursed--cursed for a ceremony of the Law; and that dancing David, the
+man who took Uriah's wife and basely murdered Uriah, was said to be the
+man after God's own heart.
+
+Soon afterwards the evil spirit fell upon my lord.  Samuel had
+commanded him to smite the Amalekites, and to spare not men or women,
+infants or sucklings, oxen or sheep, camel or ass.  Saul gathered his
+soldiers together and lay in wait in the valley.  In his mercy, for he
+was ever tender-hearted, he warned the Kenites that they might escape.
+He then smote the Amalekites from Havilah to Shur, but he took Agag
+alive, and spared some of the spoil.  When the battle was over, Samuel
+came to meet him, and rebuked him as if he had been a child for what he
+called rebellion and stubbornness.  The priest stood up before the
+king, and told him that his rebellion was as witchcraft, and his
+stubbornness as idolatry.  "Because thou hast rejected the word of the
+Lord," he cried, "He hath also rejected thee from being king."
+Rebellion, stubbornness!  Saul was neither rebellious nor stubborn.  He
+had smitten the Amalekites; in obedience to Samuel's command, he had
+done what he hated to do; he had slaughtered young and old, but he had
+saved Agag, and although he humbled himself before Samuel, and prayed
+him to remain, he would not.  Saul laid hold upon the skirt of his
+mantle; but he departed, and it was rent, and he cursed Saul, and
+declared that as the garment was rent, so had the Lord rent the kingdom
+of Israel from him that day, and given it to another better than he.
+Then Samuel called Agag unto him, and hewed the unarmed man in pieces,
+and declared he would see Saul no more.  Now Saul was brave, the
+bravest of the brave, but he greatly feared at times what he called his
+Terror.  What it was which troubled him none ever rightly knew.  He was
+not mad as others are mad, for his senses never left him, and he was
+always the counsel and the strength of the nation, whom they all sought
+in their distress.  But something had caught him of which he could not
+rid himself, and he would come to me with wild eyes, and clasp me in
+his arms.  I could not comfort him; and all I heard was a strange word
+or two about a Face which haunted him and would not leave him.  I could
+not comfort him, but it was to me nevertheless he always fled; and
+although he spoke so little, for he dared not name his Terror, he said
+to me more than he has said to any man or woman: it was I, it was I
+more than any other who knew the secrets of the king's soul.  My belief
+is that Samuel brought the Terror on him.  He never forgot that
+dreadful day when Agag was murdered, and it was always before his eyes
+that he was doomed, and that there was another man in the land, who was
+to rule in his stead.  I tried to appease him.  I told him that life to
+all of us is short, that in the grave there is forgetfulness, and bade
+him drink wine, lie in my bosom, and shut out the morrow, but it was of
+no avail.  There was nothing to be dreaded in the thought that some one
+would supplant him, and other men would have endured it in peace; but
+it was the constant presence of the thought, the impossibility of
+getting rid of it, which darkened the sun for him.  Day after day,
+night after night, this one thing was before him.  It was as if he were
+bound to a corpse, and ever dragged it after him.  Higher than any of
+the people from his shoulders and upwards, like a lion for courage, and
+yet he would have fled even to Death from this thing, for he could not
+face it.  What a mockery is the strength of the strongest!  A word from
+the Lord can cause the greatest to grovel in the dust!  It was thought
+that music would help him, and they brought to him David, who was
+skilled with the harp, and had moreover a ruddy, cheerful countenance.
+Gay and light of heart was he, and as he sang and played the Terror
+would sometimes loosen its hold, and Saul was himself again, but it
+never left him for long.
+
+Much has been made by Saul's enemies of his hatred of David.  It came
+in this way.  Saul loved David, and made him a captain, and they went
+out together to war against the Philistines.  When they returned, the
+women, smitten with his pretty face--they were always ready to go after
+him, and he after them--sang aloud in the streets that Saul had slain
+his thousands and David his ten thousands.  The Terror was on Saul; he
+believed David was Samuel's friend, and David and the Terror became
+one.  He eyed David from that day.  He was not blameworthy.  It was the
+Evil Spirit from God, and the Evil Spirit put a fixed thought in his
+mind, that if he could but remove David, the Terror would depart.
+Although I hated the son of Jesse from the beginning, I made light of
+my lord's dread of him, but who can reason against an Evil Spirit from
+God; and while David was playing the second time, my lord cast a
+javelin at him to kill him.  When the Evil Spirit departed, the desire
+to destroy David departed with it.  After Saul had cast the javelin,
+Jonathan pleaded with his father for David, and Saul listened, and
+swore that no harm should befall him; but when David soon afterwards
+returned from another battle with the Philistines, the Spirit came
+again and turned David's music into an instrument of torture, and again
+put the javelin in Saul's hand, and strove through Saul to strike David
+with it.  Hard ridden was Saul by the Spirit at that time, and he went
+to Ramah to see Samuel; and when he saw him, he, the king, my beloved,
+was so beset that he tore off his clothes, and lay down naked all
+night.  When he came back at the feast of the new moon, he sat down to
+meat with his princes, and with Abner and Jonathan; but David was not
+there.  He asked the reason of his absence, and Jonathan explained that
+David had leave to go to Bethlehem to visit his father.  Jonathan said
+nothing more, but the Evil Spirit descended even at the feast, in the
+company of all the lords, and Saul imagined that Jonathan was plotting
+against him; and in his fury, possessed by the Lord, he cast his spear
+against Jonathan also, his own best beloved son.  That was the misery
+of it; the Spirit brought him to violence, not only against those who
+were his enemies, but against those whom he loved.  To me, though, he
+was ever tender, and over our love the Spirit had no power.  Jonathan's
+anger at the time was fierce; but Jonathan was noble of heart--his
+father's son, without his father's affliction; and he knew, when he
+came to himself, that it was not the father whom he honoured who had
+done this deed.  He went out and warned David, but he did not go with
+him, and presently he returned into the city and comforted his father.
+When David had gathered together his four hundred knaves in rebellion,
+Saul sat in Gibeah under the tree there, and his servants stood round
+him in council.  They were all of them valiant and faithful, but he
+broke out against them, and accused them of conspiring with David
+against him.  "There is none," he cried, "that sheweth me that my son
+hath made a league with the son of Jesse, and there is none of you that
+is sorry for me."  "None of you that is sorry!"  His suffering was so
+great, and so little was it understood, that he believed no one cared
+for him, and at times he said bitter things which kept men apart from
+him, and sent some of them to David.  His anguish was all the greater
+because he thought Jonathan, his son, whom he so much loved, had become
+estranged from him, and secretly communicated with David, and was
+content to give up his succession to the royal crown, and take the
+second place when David should be upon the throne.  But again I say it,
+no harsh word ever came to me, although for days he would hardly speak;
+and then, suddenly, as he sat by me, he would lay his head upon my
+neck, and tears would come of which he was ashamed.
+
+The never-ceasing pursuit of David was sad even to me, and yet when the
+Spirit left him to himself Saul relented.  When David was in Engedi,
+and hard pressed, he came out to Saul and submitted himself to him.  He
+boasted that he could have slain Saul--what a boast to make! that he
+had spared the Lord's anointed and the father of Jonathan, his chosen
+friend!
+
+The king was much given to sudden change.  Sometimes his mood would
+leave him, and his face become clear in a moment, like the heavens in a
+thunderstorm when the lightning has spent itself, and the wind shifts,
+and the blue sky in an instant is revealed.  Never, when this happened,
+did he resist, and by constraint remain in his sorrow, but sang and was
+glad, and if I was beside him, delighted himself with me.  The happiest
+of men would he have been, even as a king, if the Evil Spirit from the
+Lord would have left him.  He was overcome with his ancient love for
+David, and wept, and acknowledged, although it was false, that David
+was more righteous than he, and prayed for the Lord's blessing upon
+him.  Yet even then the ever-present Fear was before him.  "I know
+well," he said, "that thou shalt surely be king, and that the kingdom
+of Israel shall be established in thine hand."  And he made David swear
+that he would not cut off the seed of the royal house, so that the name
+of Saul might live.  And David sware: David sware, the blaspheming
+liar, who gave up to the Gibeonites my sons, and the sons of Merab.  It
+was Jonathan, whom Saul had in mind when he caused David to swear; but
+Saul's prayer was but breath, for the Lord cut off Jonathan in battle,
+and Saul was the only king of the house of Kish.
+
+After Samuel's death, David, with his men, went over to the
+Philistines, who gave him Ziklag as the place of his abode.  He played
+the traitor to Achish as he had done to Saul, and he went out against
+the Geshurites, the Gezrites, and the Amalekites, the friends of
+Achish, murdering both men and women, and returned and lied to Achish,
+telling him he had fought against Judah and its allies.  Had it been
+his purpose to hide himself and to do good service to his master Saul
+in the war which the Philistines were preparing for him, his treachery
+might have excused him; but he had no mind to assist Saul or Israel.
+He sang a song after Gilboa in memory of the king and Jonathan, but he
+came not near them in the day of battle, and he profited by their
+overthrow.  He brought his men to Achish, as if he would go down with
+him to the fight; but the Philistines distrusted him, and sent him back
+to Ziklag.  Who knows what he intended?  He told Achish that he meant
+to take his part against Saul, but no word of his could ever be
+believed.  Nevertheless, I doubt not that he would have been as good as
+his promise if it had been permitted to him.  It is certain that he
+knew what was about to happen, and that, if he had been loyal to his
+prince, he would have striven to assist him.
+
+I remember that dreadful day before the day of Gilboa.  The host of the
+Philistines came and pitched in Shunem as the sand of the desert for
+number.  Saul had gathered all Israel together, but they were fewer
+than the Philistines, and disheartened.  He knew, moreover, that David
+and his men were with the enemy; and as he went out that morning, and
+saw the host of the Philistines lie upon the hillside, he greatly
+trembled, not with fear of death, for he never feared to die, but
+because his Terror was upon him, and the Lord refused to speak to him.
+He inquired of Him, but the Lord answered him not.  The high priest had
+brought the ephod, but was dumb, and the prophets heard nothing.  Two
+nights before the day of the battle, he had sought the Lord for a
+dream, and had lain down by my side in hope.  The dream came, but it
+was a dream of the Terror, and he shrieked and turned, and clasped me
+in his arms; and I soothed him, and asked him what he had dreamed, but
+he could not tell--it was a horror, awful, shapeless, which he dared
+not try to utter; and he clasped me again, me wretched, clasped me for
+the last time.  He rose and went out in the morning early; went round
+his army by himself.  He was alone, and he knew that God had forsaken
+him.
+
+In his extremity he bethought him of witchcraft.  In his zeal for God,
+which availed him nothing, he had cast out of the land all those who
+dealt with familiar spirits, but one was still left at Endor.  To her
+he went to obtain some voice from the unknown world, thinking that by
+chance light might shine in upon his despair.  But when he came to the
+woman, and she asked him what spirit she should call, he could do
+nothing but ask for Samuel.  He feared him, and yet he desired to see
+him.  It was always strange to me that he, such a king, should be so
+subdued by Samuel's presence.  It was so in life, and it was so in
+death.  The spirit of Samuel rose, and Saul humbled himself before the
+shadow.  Alas, Samuel had learned no pity through death, and his ghost
+was as fierce as the living man of years gone.  He had passed into the
+land of emptiness and vanity, yet his wrath burnt as if mortal blood
+had been in him.  Saul bowed unto him and told him his trouble, how he
+was sore distressed, for the Philistines made war upon him, and God had
+departed from him, and answered him not.  It was a dreadful sight, so
+the woman herself told me afterwards, a king abasing himself before a
+spectre of a priest and craving mercy.  The worst foe whom Saul had in
+the land would have felt his heart touched, and the wicked woman
+herself was moved with great compassion.  If success could not be
+promised, at least some comfort might have been given, but Samuel was
+bitterness itself; terrible he always was to me, so bitter and so hard
+that I shuddered at him.  He turned upon Saul and denounced him, he,
+the dead, denounced him who was about to die, and declared that the
+Lord was his enemy.  Enemy! for what, because he had spared Agag?  And
+yet that was, in a measure, the reason; for Saul was too much of a man
+for the priest, and therefore the priest set up David against him.  The
+ghost stood there, and doomed the king.  "The Lord," he cried, "hath
+rent the kingdom out of thine hand, and given it to thy neighbour, even
+to David, because thou obeyedst not the voice of the Lord, nor
+executedst His fierce wrath upon Amalek, therefore hath the Lord done
+this thing unto thee this day.  Moreover, the Lord will also deliver
+Israel with thee into the hand of the Philistines; and to-morrow shalt
+thou and thy sons be with me: the Lord also shall deliver the host of
+Israel into the hand of the Philistines."  For this cause Saul was to
+fall, and his three sons, and there was to be a great slaughter of
+Israel.  When David the adulterer murdered Uriah, was that not a worse
+crime, yet was his punishment as Saul's?  And what punishment there was
+fell not on David as it would have fallen upon my lord and upon me.
+After David's son died, he straightway rose up, eat and drank, and went
+in unto Bathsheba the whore; and she, the wife of Uriah, whom he had
+murdered, submitted to be comforted by him.
+
+When Saul heard the words of Samuel, he fell straightway in the
+darkness all along on the earth, and there was no strength in him, for
+he had eaten no bread all the day nor all the night.  The woman offered
+him bread, but he sat on the bed and would not eat.  At last, as the
+morning was breaking, he consented to eat, and he went away to make
+ready for the fight.  He was assured he would perish that day, and that
+before the sun set he would be in Sheol with Samuel, bat he did not
+play the coward and nee.  He fought as the king he was, but the
+Philistines were too many for him; the curse from the Lord was upon the
+Israelites, so that they feared and fled.  Jonathan, with Abinadab and
+Melchishua, his brothers, were around Saul to the last, but they were
+slain.  The men-at-arms dared not come near Saul, but the archers
+pressed him sorely from afar, and he could not close with them, and he
+saw his end was at hand.  He would not have the Philistines take him
+alive, wounded for sport, even if they might spare his life; and he
+therefore prayed his armour-bearer to thrust him through, but his
+armour-bearer would not.  Thereupon Saul took his sword, and fell upon
+it; and his armour-bearer fell likewise upon his sword, and died with
+him.  The next day, when the Philistines came to strip the slain, they
+found Saul and his sons dead on Gilboa, and carried off their bodies,
+shamefully using them.  But though the alarm at the victory was great,
+there were men in Israel who dared do anything for their master, the
+men of Jabesh-gilead, who remembered what Saul had done for them
+against the Ammonites; and they went by night and rescued the bodies,
+and burnt them, and buried them under this tree in Jabesh, whence they
+afterwards came to Zelah, where I shall lie.
+
+David, when he heard that Saul was dead, sang a song in his
+praise--David turned everything into songs; but nevertheless he made
+himself king, and warred against the house of his master.  Ever singing
+and dancing!  When the Ark was brought from the house of Obed-edom,
+David leaped, and danced, and played before it like an empty fool.
+Michal, who was her father's own daughter, despised her husband--as
+well she might--for his folly, and rebuked him because he behaved as a
+vain fellow rather than as a king; but she was abused, and he told her
+that if she did not honour him, he would be honoured by her maids; and
+this was true, for he never held back from a woman if she pleased him,
+and of concubines had a score.  My lord never sang, nor danced, nor
+played; it was as much as he could do if he smiled.  Would to God he
+had smiled oftener; and yet if he could not laugh, he could love.  Ah
+me! how strait was his embrace.  Was the love of that ruddy-faced,
+light-minded, lying dancer a thousandth part of Saul's?  If David had
+loved Bathsbeba, would he have sought by the basest of deceit to force
+Uriah to her after she had fallen, so that her son might be taken to be
+his?  And yet if Samuel had been alive, would he have cursed David as
+he did my lord?  I think not, for the sin and the lie with Bathsheba,
+and the murder of Uriah, were not a crime like that of sparing the
+Amalekite Agag.  Nevertheless the Lord visited him also, and he tasted
+the bitterness of revolt, for Absalom, his own son, turned against him,
+and lay with his father's concubines in the sun in the sight of all
+Israel, and sought his father's life.  Why do I talk thus?  I meant not
+to talk of David, but of my lord.  One word more.  We never speak
+without coming to that dreadful day.  Your husband, Armoni, was
+shamefully handed over to the Gibeonites and hung.  May every messenger
+of evil that does the bidding of Baal and Jehovah for ever follow the
+man who consented to that deed because Saul had rooted out the
+Gibeonites from the land in his zeal for the Lord.  In his zeal for the
+Lord!  His zeal for the Israelitish Lord, and at Samuel's bidding!  It
+was not the desire of Saul to deal thus with the Gibeonites, for he,
+the husband of a Horite, was never a fool in his wrath for his God; but
+Samuel, whom he dreaded more than the Philistines, bade him.  And the
+plague came, and they said it was from the Lord, because of these
+Gibeonites whom the Lord, through Samuel, had directed should be slain.
+Ah me!  I, a Horite, know not the ways of Jehovah.  I sit here in
+Jabesh and wait till I shall be with those whom I loved, with Saul,
+Armoni, and his brother.  I go down into the darkness with them, but it
+will be better than the light.  Maybe though dark I shall see them, and
+be something of a queen--I, Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, queen of the
+first king of Israel, he who has made it a nation.
+
+
+
+
+MIRIAM'S SCHOOLING.
+
+"_He wrung the water from his dress, and, plunging into the moors,
+directed his course to the north-east by the assistance of the polar
+star_."--THE MONASTERY.
+
+"_That man amongst mortals who has acquiesced in Necessity is wise, and
+is acquainted with divine things_."--EURIPIDES.
+
+Giacomo Tacchi was a watchmaker in Cowfold.  He lived, not in the
+central square or market-place of the town, for a watchmaker's business
+in Cowfold was scarcely of sufficient importance for such a position,
+but two or three doors round the corner.  It was in Church Street, just
+before the private houses begin, a little low-roofed cottage, much
+lower than its neighbours, for what reason nobody could tell--much
+lower certainly; and yet there it was, a solid, indisputable, wedged-in
+assertion, not to be ousted in any way.  It had two small bow windows,
+one belonging to a sitting-room, and the other to the shop.  Across the
+curve of the shop bow window a kind of counter was fixed.  Here were
+Giacomo's lamp, his glass-globe reflector, or light-condenser; here
+were all his tools; here lay under tumblers or wine-glasses the works
+of the watches on which he was operating, and here he wrought from
+morning to night with a lens which slipped into its place in his eye
+with such wonderful celerity and precision, that it was difficult to
+believe it had not by long acquaintance with the eye become as much a
+part of it as the eyelid itself.  Inside the window, along the window
+frames, hung perhaps twenty or thirty watches, some of which had been
+cleaned or repaired, and were waiting till their owners might call,
+whilst others had been acquired in different ways, by exchange or by
+purchase, and were for sale.  There were no absolutely brand new
+watches in the collection.  If a new watch was ordered as a wedding
+present or a gift to a son or daughter on the twenty-first birthday, it
+was specially manufactured.  Immediately to the left of Giacomo was his
+regulator, of which he was justly proud, for it did not vary above a
+minute a month.  Nevertheless its performance was checked every week by
+the watch of the mail-coach guard, who brought the time from St. Paul's
+as he started from St. Martin's-le-Grand, and communicated it to the
+Cowfold mail-cart driver.  All round the shop were clocks of numerous
+patterns, but mostly of two types, one Dutch, and one with oak or
+mahogany case.  Perhaps a dozen or so were generally going, and it was
+rather distracting to a visitor to see the pendulums of the Dutch
+clocks wagging at different rates, some with excited haste, others with
+solemn gravity, and no two at the same speed.  Each seemed confident it
+was in direct communication with Greenwich Observatory, and paid not
+the slightest attention to the others.  It was seldom that the footpath
+in front of the watchmaker's window was empty.  Generally a boy or girl
+stood there with nose flattened against the panes staring at Giacomo
+busied with his craft.  For it was a genuine mystery to the children,
+and he was a mysterious person in other ways.  Under his care was the
+church clock.  He went up into the tower, and into a great closet in
+which nobody else in Cowfold had ever been.  Furthermore, as an adjunct
+to the watchmaking, he repaired barometers and thermometers, and it is
+certain that not a farmer within ten miles of Cowfold knew what was at
+the back of the plate of his weather-glass.
+
+How a man with such a name as Tacchi came to settle in Cowfold was
+never understood.  Giacomo's father and mother appeared there about the
+beginning of the century: a son was born within three years after their
+arrival, and is the Tacchi now before us.
+
+It might have been supposed that his occupation would have inclined him
+to melancholy.  Far from it.  He was a brisk, active creature, about
+middle height, with jet black hair, and a quick circulation.  He was
+never overcome, as he might reasonably have been, with meditations on
+the flux of time.  He never rose in the morning saddened by the thought
+that the day would be just like the day before, or that the watches
+with which he had to deal would show just the same faults and just the
+same carelessness on the part of their possessors.  On the contrary, he
+always sprang out of bed with as much zest and buoyancy as if he were a
+Columbus confidently expecting that before noon the shores of a new
+world would rise over the ocean's edge.
+
+Giacomo, when he succeeded to the business, married the daughter of a
+small farmer in the neighbourhood.  It all came about through a couple
+of little oak wedges.  He took a tall clock home after it had been
+repaired, and as the floor of the living-room on which it stood was
+uneven, the front of the clock at the base was always wedged up to
+bring it perpendicular, and keep the top from overhanging.  He was
+obliged to ask Miriam, the eldest girl, to stand on a footstool, and
+push the clock towards the wall.  As she stretched her right arm up
+just under the little gilt cherub who expanded his wings above the
+dial, holding the frame with her left, he stepped back a little, and
+was suddenly struck with the beauty of her attitude.  A lovely line it
+was from the tips of her fingers down to her heel, and the slight
+strain just lifted the hem of her gown, and showed the whitest of white
+stockings, and a shapely foot.  Giacomo instantly fell in love.
+
+"Is that right, Mr. Tacchi?" she said.
+
+"Quite right; nothing could be better."
+
+Giacomo would not, however, insert the wedges; they were soft, and
+might be broader; he would cut some better ones out of mahogany or oak,
+and bring them the next day.  The next day he brought them, and in a
+very short time married Miss Miriam solely on the strength of the
+lovely line, the white stockings, and the foot.  When she came to live
+at his house in Cowfold, he found that she did not always stand on the
+footstool and display the same curve, but nevertheless she made him a
+fairly good wife, and he and she lived together on the usual marital
+terms, without any particular raptures, and without any particular
+discord, for five years, when unfortunately she died, after giving
+birth to her second child, which was named Miriam, after its mother.
+Giacomo was left with an elder boy, Andrew, and with the infant.
+
+Andrew grew up something like his mother, a fairly average mortal who
+learned his lessons tolerably, was distinguished by no eminent virtues
+nor eminent vices, no eminent gratitude nor hatreds; and it seemed as
+if he would one day in the fulness of time do what Cowfold for
+centuries had done before him--that is to say, succeed his father in
+his business, marry some average Cowfold girl, beget more average
+Cowfold children, lead a life unvexed by any speculation or dreams,
+unenlightened by any revelation, and finally sleep in Cowfold
+churchyard with thousands of his predecessors, remembered for perhaps a
+year, and then forgotten for ever.
+
+Miriam, however, was of a different stamp.  Her real ancestry was a
+puzzle.  In some respects she resembled her father.  Knowing that she
+was Giacomo's child, it was easy for the observer to trace the lineage
+of some of her qualities; but nevertheless they reappeared in her on a
+different scale, in different proportions, so that in action they
+became totally different, and there were others not inherited from
+Giacomo which modified all the rest.  It is impossible to throw a new
+characteristic into a given nature, and obtain as a result the original
+nature _plus_ the characteristic added.  The addition will most likely
+change the whole mass, and often entirely degrade or translate it.  It
+is just possible, such are the wonders of spiritual chemistry, that
+there may have been nothing in Miriam but her father with a touch of
+her mother, and that the combination of the two may have wrought this
+curiously diverse product; or the common explanation may have been
+correct, that in her there was a resurrection of some unknown ancestor,
+either on the father's or mother's side.  She was a big girl--her
+father was rather short and squat--with black hair and dark eyes, limbs
+loosely set, with a tendency to sprawl, large feet and hands.  She had
+a handsome, regular face, a little freckled; but the mouth, although it
+was beautifully curved, was a trifle too long, and except when she was
+in a passion, was not sufficiently under the control of her muscles, so
+that her words escaped not properly formed.  Generally she was rather
+languid in her attitudes, sitting in her chair in any way but the
+proper way, and often giving her father cause of correction on this
+point as she grew up, inasmuch as he properly objected that when she
+came to be thirteen or fourteen she ought to show that she duly
+appreciated the reasons why her frocks were lengthened.  Her room was
+never in order.  Nothing was ever hung up; nothing was put in its
+place.  Shoes were here and there--one might be under the
+dressing-table and the other under the bed; but with, an odd
+inconsistency she was always personally particularly clean, and
+although bathing was then unknown in Cowfold, she had a tub, and used
+it too with constant soap and water.  With her lessons she did not
+succeed, more particularly with arithmetic, which she abhorred.
+Sometimes they were done, sometimes left undone, but she never failed
+in history.  Her voice was a contralto of most remarkable power, strong
+enough to fill a cathedral, but altogether undisciplined.  She was fond
+of music, and the organist at the church offered to teach her with his
+own daughters, if she would sing with them on Sundays; but she could
+not get through the drudgery of the exercises, and advanced only so far
+as to be able to take her proper part in a hymn.  Here, however, she
+was almost useless, from incapability of proper subordination, the
+sopranos, tenors, and basses being well nigh drowned.
+
+She was fond of live creatures, and had cats, canaries, white mice, and
+rabbits, which she treated with great tenderness; but they were never
+kept clean, and caused much annoyance to her family.  She was also
+truthful; but what distinguished her most was a certain originality in
+her criticisms on Cowfold men, women, and events, a certain
+rectification which she always gave to the conventional mode of
+regarding them.  There was a bit of sandstone rock near the town, by
+the side of the road, which from time immemorial had been called the
+Old Man's Nose.  It was something like a nose when seen at a certain
+angle, but why it should have been described as the nose of an old man
+rather than that of a young man, no mortal could have explained.
+Nevertheless all Cowfold had for ages said it was the Old Man's Nose;
+and when strangers came it was pointed out with a "don't you see, isn't
+it hooked, just like a nose, and that is where his spectacles might
+lie."  But Miriam made a small revolution in Cowfold.  She never would
+admit the likeness to a nose, but with a pleasant humour observed that
+it was like a _mug_ upside down--"mug," it must be explained, meaning
+not only a drinking utensil, but in very vulgar language a human face.
+Cowfold gradually heard of Miriam's joke, and instantly saw that the
+rock was really like a mug.  There was the upper part, there was the
+handle; the resemblance to the nose disappeared, and what was most
+strange, could no more be imagined.  Cowfold now repeated to visitors
+this little bit of not very brilliant smartness, elaborating it heavily
+at times, till it would have become rather a weariness to the flesh, if
+it had not been a peculiarity of Cowfold, that it was never tired of
+saying the same thing over and over again, and laughing at it
+perpetually.
+
+One day a great event happened.  There was a fire in the town, and the
+house of Mr. Cutts, the saddler, was burnt down.  A week afterwards
+some very unpleasant rumours were abroad, and the Tacchis, with Mrs.
+and Mr. Cattle, and the two Misses Cattle, sat talking over them in Mr.
+Tacchi's parlour after supper.  The Cattles were small farmers who
+lived about a mile out of Cowfold, on the way to Shott, but within
+Cowfold parish, and came to Cowfold Church.
+
+"If," said Cattle, "they can prove as the fire broke out in three
+places at once, the office has got him."
+
+"His stock," continued his wife, "to my certain knowledge, warn't worth
+fifty pound, for I was in the shop a fortnight ago, and says I to
+myself, 'What can the man have let it down like this for--who'd come
+here for anything; and it _did_ cross my mind as it was very odd, and I
+went home a thinking and a thinking, but of course I never dreamed as
+he was so awful wicked as this."
+
+"He was always very peculiar, mother," said the elder Miss Cattle.  "Do
+you remember, Carry," turning to her younger sister, "how he jumped out
+of the hedge that Sunday evening, just as we turned down our lane.  Oh
+my, I never had such a fright--you might have knocked me down with a
+straw; and he never spoke, but walked straight on."
+
+"He might have been nutting," said Giacomo--"he was always going out
+nutting; and perhaps he didn't notice he had frightened you."
+
+"Not notice!  I am sure he might have done; and then, why did he come
+out just then, I should like to know.  If he had come out just after
+we'd got by, I shouldn't have thought so much of it."
+
+"If the poor man was in the hedge, he must come out at some time, and
+it happened to be just then," observed Giacomo reflectively.
+
+"Ah!" continued Carry, incapable of replying to Giacomo's philosophy,
+and judiciously changing her attack, "whenever you went to buy anything
+he never spoke up to you like--there was always an underhand look about
+him; and then his living alone as he did with nobody but that old woman
+with him."
+
+"He always sold good leather," continued Mr. Cattle, who planted both
+his elbows on the table, and placed his head in his hands in a fit of
+abstraction, much perplexed by this apparent contradiction in Cutts's
+character.
+
+"Sold good leather," retorted his wife with great sharpness, as if in
+contempt of her husband's stupidity; "sold good leather--of course he
+did.  That was part of his plan to make people believe he was an honest
+man.  Besides, if he hadn't, how could he have got rid of his stock as
+he did.  Do you recollect," she proceeded with increasing asperity, as
+became a Cowfold matron, "as it was him as got up that petition for
+that Catchpool gal as was going to be hanged for putting her baby in
+the pond?"
+
+"His father," quoth Mr. Cattle, inclining again to his wife's side,
+"had a glass eye, and I've heerd his mother was a Papist."
+
+"Well," interrupted Miriam at last, "what if he did set fire to his
+house?"
+
+They all looked amazed.  "What if he did! what if he did!" repeated Mr.
+Cattle; "why, it's arson, that's all."
+
+"Oh, that's saying the same thing over again."
+
+"He'll be transported, that's 'what if he did,'" interposed Mrs. Cattle.
+
+"I suppose," said Miriam, "he wanted to get money out of the Insurance
+Office.  It was wrong, but he hasn't done much harm except to the
+office, and they can afford it."
+
+They were all still more amazed, and justly, for Miriam, amongst her
+other peculiarities, did not comprehend how society necessarily
+readjusts the natural scale of reward and punishment.
+
+"'Pon--my--word," exclaimed Mrs. Cattle, after a long pause, slowly
+dwelling on each syllable, "hasn't--done--much--harm; and for aught we
+know, in a month, or at most six weeks, he'll be tried, and then after
+that, in a fortnight, he may be on his way to Botany Bay.  What do you
+think, Mr. Tacchi?"
+
+Giacomo did not occupy the same position as his daughter.  His eyes
+were screwed very nearly, although not quite, to the conventional
+angle; but he loved her, and had too much sense not to see that she was
+often right and Cowfold was wrong.  Moreover, he enjoyed her antagonism
+to the Cattles, of whose intellect he had not, as a clock and barometer
+maker, a very high opinion.  He evaded the difficulty.
+
+"He hasn't been convicted yet."
+
+"That's true," said Mr. Cattle, to whom, as an Englishman, the
+principle of not passing sentence till both sides are heard was happily
+familiar.  It was a great thought with him, and he re-expressed it with
+earnestness--"That's true enough."
+
+But Miriam did not let them off.  "I want to know if he is as bad as
+those contractors that father was reading about in the newspaper last
+week, who filled up the soldiers' boots between the soles with clay.
+If they hadn't been found out, the poor soldiers would have gone
+marching with those boots, and might have been out in the wet, and
+might have died."
+
+"Ah!" retorted Miss Cattle, "that's all very well; but that isn't
+arson."
+
+Miss Cattle was not quite so absurd as she seemed.  The contractors'
+crime was not catalogued with an ugly name.  It was fraud or breach of
+contract, and that of course made all the difference.
+
+Miriam did not notice her antagonist's argument, but proceeded
+musingly--"He was never unkind.  He was very good to that old woman,
+his aunt."
+
+"Unkind!"  Mrs. Cattle almost screamed, her harsh grating voice
+contrasting most unpleasantly with the low, indistinct, mellow tones in
+which Miriam had uttered the last two or three words.  "Unkind!  What's
+that in a man as is a going to be brought up before the 'sizes.  I can
+see the judge a sentencing of him now."
+
+"He may have been very poor, and may have lost all his money,"
+continued Miriam; "anyhow, he wasn't cruel.  I would sooner have hung
+old Scrutton, who flogged little Jack Marshall for stealing apples till
+his back was all covered with bloody weals."
+
+The clocks in the shop began at that moment to strike ten in a dozen
+different tones, as if they discerned the hopelessness of the
+discussion, and were determined to cut it short.  The company
+consequently separated, and Miriam went to bed; but not to sleep, for
+before her eyes, half through the night, was sailing the ship in which
+she thought poor Cutts would be exiled.  Let it not for a moment be
+supposed that Mr. Cutts was a young man, and that Miriam was in love
+with him.  He was about fifty.
+
+Next morning she was still more distressed.  Sometimes the morning
+brings forgetfulness of the trouble of the day before, and at other
+times it revives with peculiar power just at the moment when we wake,
+especially if it be dark.  Miriam was confused.  The belief that she
+ought to do something if possible to help Cutts was just dawning upon
+her; but although she was singularly liable to be set fast to any
+purpose when once she had it clearly formed, it was always a long time
+before it became formed.  She was not one of those happy persons whose
+thoughts are always beneath them, as the horses of a coach are beneath
+the driver, and can be directed this way or that way at his bidding.
+She could not settle beforehand that she would think upon a given
+subject, and step by step disentangle its difficulties, and pursue it
+to the end.  That is the result of continuous training, and of this she
+had had none.  Ideas passed through her mind with great rapidity, but
+they were spontaneous, and consequently disconnected, so that in
+difficulty the path was chosen without any balancing of the reasons on
+this and on the other side, which, forced the conclusion that it was
+the proper path to take.
+
+A thousand things whirled through her brain.  She had known all about
+Cutts before the conversation with the Cattles, or with the Cattle, as
+she generally called them; but the case had not struck her till they
+and she began to talk about it.  She was in a great turmoil, and plans
+presented themselves to her, were discarded, and then presented
+themselves again as if they were quite new.  The next night she slept
+well.  More than ever was she impressed with horror at what seemed to
+be Cutts's certain fate--more than ever was she resolved to help him if
+she could; and now at last she was a little clearer, and had determined
+to go over to the county town and see Messrs. Mortimer, Wake, Collins
+and Mortimer, the solicitors in whose hands the defence lay.  She did
+not doubt it to be her duty to go, although Cutts was no more to her
+than to any other person in Cowfold, and she had no notion of what she
+was going to say to the lawyers when she saw them.  On the following
+morning she started, under the pretence that she wanted something she
+could not obtain in Cowfold.  Having no mother, and being manageress in
+a small way at home, these trips were not unusual.  Courageous as she
+was, when she reached the office her heart sank, and she then first
+remembered that she had no very solid ground for her visit.  She had
+brooded in her bedroom over Cutts, and had thought what a grand thing
+it would be to save him, but when she stepped inside Messrs. Mortimer's
+door, and was face to face with a raised desk, protected by rails,
+behind which clerks were busy writing, or answering questions, her
+dreams disappeared; she saw what a fool she was, and she would have
+liked to retreat.  However, it was too late, for one of the gentlemen,
+behind the rails asked what she wanted.
+
+"I've come about Mr. Cutts."
+
+"Oh yes; committed for arson at Cowfold.  Sit down in that room for a
+few minutes.  Mr. Mortimer will attend to you presently."
+
+Miriam was shown into a little box-like den, in which there was a
+round, leather-covered table, with a couple of chairs, but no books,
+and no newspaper.  She had to wait for twenty terrible minutes, in
+which her excitement increased to such a degree that once or twice she
+was on the point of rushing out past the clerks, and running back to
+Cowfold.  But she did not do it, and after a while Mr. Mortimer entered.
+
+"Well, Miss Tacchi, what can I do for you?"  He was gentle in his
+behaviour, and he soothed by his first words poor Miriam's flutter.
+
+"Oh, if you please, sir, Mr. Cutts is not guilty."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"It is a cruel thing that he should suffer.  He is as kind a creature
+as ever lived.  You don't know how kind he has been to his old aunt.
+He always sold honest things.  There are scores of people in Cowfold
+who deserve to be transported more than he."
+
+"That won't help him much.  Good people are a queer set sometimes.  But
+why should _you_ interfere?"
+
+"I cannot tell," replied Miriam, her voice beginning to shake; "but I
+thought and I thought over it, and it is so wrong, so unfair, so
+wicked, and I know the poor man so well.  Why should they do anything
+to him?"  She would have proceeded in the same strain, and would have
+compared the iniquity of arson with that of fraudulent contractors and
+the brutal Scrutton, but she checked herself.  "He is not guilty," she
+added.
+
+Mr. Mortimer was perplexed.  He was accustomed in his profession to all
+kinds of concealment of motives, and he conjectured that there must be
+some secret of which he was unaware.
+
+"Are you any relation?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Have you ever visited at his house, or has he been in the habit of
+calling at yours?"
+
+"No."
+
+He was still more perplexed.  He could not comprehend, and might very
+well be excused for not comprehending, why the daughter of a
+respectable tradesman in Cowfold should walk six miles on behalf of a
+stranger, and be so anxious about him.
+
+"One more question.  You have had nothing whatever to do with Mr.
+Cutts, except by going to his shop, and by talking to him now and then
+as a neighbour?"
+
+"Nothing;" and Miriam said it in such a manner, that the most hardened
+sceptic must have believed her.
+
+"The fire broke out at a quarter to eight.  Had you seen Cutts about
+that time?"
+
+"I had met him in the street that evening as I came home."
+
+"Where had you been?"
+
+"Practising in the church."
+
+"What time was it when you met him?  Be careful."
+
+Miriam now realised the importance of her answer.
+
+The exact truth was that she had reached home at half-past seven, and
+had seen Cutts going into his house then.  It must be remembered that
+although, as before observed, she was naturally truthful, she was so
+because she was fearless, and had the instinctive tendency to
+directness possessed by all forceful characters.  Her veracity rested
+on no principle.  She was not like Jeanie Deans, that triumph of
+culture, in whom a generalisation had so far prevailed that it was able
+to overcome the strongest of passions and prevent a lie even to save a
+sister's life.  Miriam had been brought up in no such divine school.
+She had heard that lying was wrong, but she had no religion, although
+she listened to a sermon once every Sunday, and consequently the
+relation in which the several duties and impulses stood to one another
+was totally different from that which was established in Sir Walter's
+heroine.  By some strange chance, too, tradition, which often takes the
+place of religion, had no power over her; and although hatred of
+oppression and of harsh dealing is a very estimable quality, and one
+which will go a long way towards constructing an ethical system for us,
+it will not do everything.
+
+She began to reflect.  She had no watch with her.  She had noticed the
+clocks when she returned, and she remembered that they showed half-past
+seven.  She could not at the moment deliberately say a quarter to
+eight, although really it did not much matter.  Who would be the worse
+if she declared it was a quarter to eight?  Nobody, and she knew that
+Cutts would be the better.  She had not specially observed the clocks;
+how could she, for she had no notion that anything important depended
+upon accuracy.  She was short-sighted, and she had not seen the
+regulator.  Nothing was actually before her eyes but a great Dutch
+kitchen clock, which showed half-past seven, and might have been wrong.
+Something struck when she left the church, and the strokes chimed again
+in her ears as she was shaping her reply to Mr. Mortimer.  They sounded
+like half-past, and in that case it must have been a quarter to eight
+when she stood on her doorstep.  Finally, there was the reason of
+reasons which superseded the necessity of any further attempt to
+persuade herself by any casuistry--she must save Cutts.
+
+"A quarter to eight," she said decisively,
+
+"Odd that you should have seen him just at that time.  In less than
+five minutes the place was in a blaze.  He could hardly have lit it up
+himself.  Would you swear before the Court it was a quarter to eight?"
+
+If she had been asked this at first she would have hesitated, but she
+now boldly said "Yes."
+
+"Very well; I do not see what more I can do now.  I will think over the
+matter," and Miriam departed.
+
+The lawyer had his suspicions, and determined, after some inquiries in
+Cowfold, that Miss Miriam should not be called.  He told the story to
+his partner, who laughed, and said he did not see anything
+extraordinary in it.  It was a common case of perjury.  Mr. Mortimer
+was not sure that it was common perjury.  Externally it might be so,
+and yet there seemed to be a difference.  Moreover, he could not find
+out anything in Cowfold to make him believe that there was any motive
+for it.
+
+"Perfectly motiveless," he replied.  "A noteworthy instance," for he
+was a bit of a philosopher, "of an action performed without any motive
+whatever.  I have always maintained the possibility of such actions."
+
+As to Miriam, she went back to Cowfold without any self-accusation or
+self-applause.  She did not know that there was anything criminal or
+generous in her attempt on behalf of Cutts.  We may say in parting that
+he was acquitted, to her great delight; and Mr. Cattle, with the pride
+of a British citizen who has served on a jury and knows the law, did
+not cease to preach to his wife, whenever the opportunity offered, that
+you should never pronounce the verdict till you've heard the evidence.
+
+Soon after Mr. Cutts's return to Cowfold Mr. Tacchi one day surprised
+his household by telling them he meant to take another wife.  Andrew
+was silent, but Miriam at once flew into a violent passion, and thereby
+greatly incensed her father.  There was no cause for her anger.  Mrs.
+Brooks, whom Giacomo had chosen, was, as the second choice often is,
+just the woman who was necessary to him.  She was about forty, a good
+manager, with an equable temper, a widow, with no children, not in the
+least degree rigid, but, on the contrary, affectionate.  She had seen
+some trouble with her first husband, who was a little farmer and drank,
+and consequently, although she was a churchwoman, had been driven to
+the Bible, and had found much comfort therein.  "Although she was a
+churchwoman" may sound rather strange, but still it is a fact that in
+those days in Cowfold the church people, and for that matter the
+Dissenters too, did not read their Bibles; but amongst the Dissenters
+there was here and there a remnant of the ancient type to whom the
+Bible was everything.  Amongst the church people there were very few or
+none.
+
+Why Miriam should be so wrathful with her father it is extremely
+difficult to say.  It is certain she did not object to her deposition
+as housekeeper.   She never cared for her duties as mistress.  Perhaps
+one reason was that she chose to resent the apparent displacement of
+her own mother.  She never knew her, and owed her nothing except her
+birth; but she was _her_ mother, and she took sides with her, and
+considered her insulted, and became her partisan with perfect fury.
+Perhaps, too, Miriam was slightly jealous that her father, who was now
+nearing his half century, should show himself not altogether dead to
+love.  She would have liked to find him insensible, leaving all love
+affairs to his children, and she once even went so far as to use the
+word "disgusting" in conversing with Andrew on the subject.
+
+Giacomo, however, was very determined, notwithstanding his affection
+for his daughter, and disagreeable scenes took place between them.  She
+showed her displeasure in a thousand ways, and was positively rude to
+Mrs. Brooks when she invited Miriam to her house.
+
+Giacomo had a sister, a Mrs. Dabb, who lived in London.  She had
+married a provision dealer in the Borough, and he employed not only a
+staff of assistants, but a couple of clerks.  Mrs. Dabb, oddly enough,
+was a fair-haired woman, with blue eyes and a rosy complexion.  She had
+rather a wide, plump face, and wore her hair in ringlets.  She lived at
+the shop, but she had a drawing-room over it with a circular table in
+the middle, and round it lay the "Keepsake" and "Friendship's
+Offering," in red silk, with Mrs. Hemans' and Mr. Montgomery's poetry.
+Into these she occasionally looked, and refreshed herself by comparing
+her intellect with that of the female kind generally.  She desired
+above everything not to be considered commonplace, believed in love at
+first sight, was not altogether unfavourable to elopements, carefully
+repressed any tendency to unnecessary order, wore a loose dressing-gown
+all the morning, had her breakfast in bed, let her hair stray a little
+over her face, cultivated a habit of shaking it off and pushing it back
+with her fingers, and generally went as far to be thought a little
+"wild" as was possible for the wife of a respectable, solid, eminently
+British, close-fisted Borough tradesman.  Nevertheless she had a huge
+appetite, and always had ham or sausages for tea.  Giacomo she
+despised, on the ground that his occupation was so limited, that it
+contracted the imagination, and that he did not "live in the
+metropolis, but vegetated in a country town."  She consequently very
+seldom visited Cowfold, and very seldom wrote to her brother.  Giacomo,
+however, thought it his duty to tell his sister of his approaching
+marriage; and Mrs. Dabb, who was endowed with great curiosity, replied
+that, if it was quite agreeable, she would come to Cowfold for two or
+three days to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Brooks and obtain a change
+of air, as she had suffered somewhat from feelings of languor of late
+and a little fever on the nerves.  Accordingly she came, and in a short
+time saw what was the state of affairs between Miriam and her father.
+She rather liked Miriam, chiefly for her defects; and as Giacomo had
+been a little freer than usual with his sister one evening, and had
+expressed his fears that Miriam and Mrs. Brooks would not agree, Mrs.
+Dabb gave him some advice.
+
+"Miriam, my dear Giacomo, is a bit of a genius, untamed and irregular,
+reminding me something of myself."
+
+Giacomo did not much believe in untamed irregular genius.  It was
+certainly of no use in clockmaking.
+
+"Well, what then?"
+
+"I should say that she suffers through limitation of her sphere.  No
+suffering like that, Giacomo.  Ah me!"
+
+Mrs. Dabb shook back her hair, and put both her hands to her forehead.
+
+"Does your head ache?"
+
+"No; at least not more than usual.  I always have a weight there; I
+believe it is merely ideas.  I asked a very eminent young man who lives
+not far from us--he occupies a high position in the hospital--a
+dresser, I think, they call him; and he said it was due to
+overstrung--dear me, what was it!  I remember putting it down, it
+seemed so exactly to coincide with my own views."
+
+Mrs. Dabb looked in her pocket-book.
+
+"Overstrung cerebration, that was it; overstrung cerebration."
+
+"What were you going to say about Miriam?"
+
+"A little proposal.  My husband wants a clerk.  Why not let Andrew take
+the place, and Miriam be his housekeeper?  We have no room for them,
+but apartments are to be procured at a low rate."
+
+This was in reality Miriam's scheme.  She had heard of the vacancy in
+Mr. Dabb's establishment, and had implored her aunt to use her
+influence with Giacomo to gain his assent to Andrew's removal.  Mrs.
+Dabb was not an unkind woman; she really thought she liked Miriam, and
+she consented.  She had even gone so far as to encourage her in the
+belief that she "vegetated," and the word opened up to her a new world.
+"Vegetate"--it stuck to her, and became a motive power.  Great is the
+power of a thought, but greater still is the power of a phrase, and it
+may be questioned whether phrase is not more directly responsible than
+thought for our religion, our politics, our philosophy, our love, our
+hatred, our hopes and fears.
+
+"I do not think," said Giacomo, "they could live on a clerk's salary.
+Andrew would not be worth much as a beginner."
+
+"It is astonishing, my dear Giacomo, upon how little people can live,
+if their wants are simple, like my own, for example; and then Andrew
+would have the opportunity of acquiring animal food at a cheap rate."
+
+"I do not like the thought of parting with the children, and I fear the
+dangers of London, especially for a girl like Miriam."
+
+"I would take them, Giacomo, under my wing.  Besides, as a dear friend
+once observed to me, evil has no power over the pure soul.  I feel it
+myself; it cannot come near me; it dissolves, it departs.  What is the
+Borough to me with all its snares?  I am in a different world."
+
+Giacomo for some time refused; but Miriam was alternately so unpleasant
+and so coaxing, that at last he consented.  Poor Andrew had really no
+will of his own in the affair.  He was a gentle, docile creature whom
+clockmaking suited, but he was pleased at the thought of the change,
+and who could tell? he might rise to a position at his uncle's far
+beyond anything which he could attain in Cowfold.
+
+After some negotiation, therefore, Miriam and Andrew departed for
+London, the salary being fixed at thirty-eight shillings a week.  To
+this Giacomo added twelve shillings a week--two pounds ten shillings
+altogether.  It was a happy day for both of them when they journeyed to
+the end of Cowfold Lane, and waited for the coach; they were happier
+still when they were mounted on the top, and were at last on the great
+London road, and already on the line which, was in direct communication
+with the great city.  It was different altogether from the Cowfold
+roads, and there was a metropolitan air about it.  They continually met
+coaches going away to York, Newcastle, and even to Edinburgh, and the
+drivers mutely saluted by lifting their whips as they passed.  Two
+drivers had thus met for forty years, and had never spoken a single
+word to one another.  At last one died, and the other took his death so
+much to heart that he sickened and died too.  The inns were nothing
+like the Cowfold inns.  They were huge places, with stables like
+barracks, and outside each of them were relays of beautiful horses
+standing ready for the change.  The scenery from Huntingdon to London
+is not particularly attractive, but to Miriam and Andrew the Alps could
+not have been more fascinating.  They wondered that others did not
+share their excitement, and Andrew thought that a coachman must be the
+happiest of men.
+
+At last they reached Barnet, the last stage, and immediately afterwards
+they saw the line of the smoke-cloud which lay over the goal of all
+their aspirations, the promised land in which nothing but golden
+romance awaited them.  Presently a waypost was passed, with the words
+_To the West End_ upon it, so that they might now be fairly said to be
+at least in a suburb.  Ten minutes more brought them to Highgate
+Archway, and there, with its dome just emerging above the fog, was St.
+Paul's!  They could hardly restrain themselves, and Miriam squeezed
+Andrew's hand in ecstasy.  They rattled on through Islington, and made
+their first halt at the "Angel," astonished and speechless at the
+crowds of people, at the shops, and most of all at the infinity of
+streets branching off in all directions.  Dingy Clerkenwell and
+Aldersgate Street were gilded with a plentiful and radiant deposit of
+that precious metal of which healthy youth has such an infinite
+store--actual metal, not the "delusive ray" by any means, for it is the
+most real thing in existence, more real than the bullion forks and
+spoons which we buy later on, when we feel we can afford them, and far
+more real than the silver tea-service with which, still later, we are
+presented amidst cheers by our admiring friends in the ward which we
+represent in the Common Council, for our increasing efforts to uphold
+their interests.
+
+At the Bull and Mouth they saw that marvel, the General Post Office,
+but they had not much time to look at it, for here they were met by a
+young man from Mr. Dabb.  They were disappointed that Mrs. Dabb had not
+come, but a verbal excuse was offered that she was in bed with a
+headache.  Mr. Dabb, of course, was too busy to leave.  The messenger
+was commissioned to take them to their uncle's, where they were to have
+tea; and after tea they were to go to the lodgings which Mrs. Dabb had
+provisionally selected for them.  In a few minutes they had crossed
+London Bridge, and drew up in front of Mr. Dabb's house.  There was no
+private entrance, and they encountered their uncle on the pavement.  He
+was short and thick, with a very florid complexion, and wore a brown
+jersey, and a white apron fastened at the back with a curious brass
+contrivance.  There were two or three people with him, and he had a
+knife in his hand.  The doors were wide open; there seemed to be no
+windows, and in fact Mr. Dabb's establishment was a portion of the
+street just a little recessed.  He was in and out continually, now on
+the pathway talking to a customer there, and then passing inside to the
+ladies who were a little more genteel, and preferred to state their
+wants under cover.  At the back of the shop was a desk perched up
+aloft, just big enough for one person, and with a gaslight over it.
+Andrew noticed it, and thought of winter, and wondered how anybody
+could sit there during a January day with the snow on the ground, or
+during a cold thaw.
+
+Mr. Dabb put down his knife and shook hands with them.
+
+"Well, Mr. Andrew, so you've come to make your fortune--long hours,
+hard work, stick at nothing; cutting place the Borough.  Better go
+inside.  Put your traps up in that corner; you'll want 'em again
+directly.  Aunt's abed upstairs; can't see you to-night."
+
+They went into a little greasy back parlour, lighted by a skylight, if
+indeed a window could be so called whose connection with the sky was so
+far from being immediate.
+
+Mr. Dabb looked in.  "You'll have some tea in a minute.  I myself can't
+leave--shorthanded."
+
+They were not asked to wash or take off their travelling clothes.
+
+Presently a slut of a girl appeared with a tray on which there were
+some ham, a shapeless mass of butter which looked as if it had been
+scooped out of a pot, a loaf, a teapot, some cups and saucers, a milk
+jug, and two plates, with knives and forks.  She went to a cupboard,
+put a black cruet-stand on the table, and as the milk had been spilt
+over the bread, she took the plate to the fender, emptied it amongst
+the ashes, and wiped it with her apron.  The apron was also used to
+wipe the butter plate, on which there was an unusually black mark, with
+lines resembling the imprint of a very big thumb.  In about
+half-an-hour after they had refreshed themselves Uncle Dabb looked in.
+
+"Better be off before it gets dark.  Eight o'clock sharp to-morrow
+morning, Andrew.  Sharp's the word.  Breakfast before you come.  My boy
+will show you your quarters.  Needn't take them unless you like them."
+
+A cab was called, their luggage was put upon it, and they were landed
+in Nelson Square.  The lodgings were three rooms at the back of the
+house, two of them garrets at the top, and the third a small
+sitting-room on the ground floor, behind the front parlour.  They
+looked rather dismal, and Miriam inquired whether they could not have
+front rooms.
+
+"Oh yes, ma'am; but they would come more expensive.  Mrs. Dabb told me
+she didn't think you would like to pay more than thirteen shillings and
+sixpence a week without extras, which is exceedingly cheap for this
+part, and the front rooms corresponding would be five-and-twenty
+shillings."
+
+This settled the question.  They had fancied an outlook on a gay
+promenade, and they had in its place a waste expanse of dirty dull
+roofs and smoking chimneys.  If they looked down below, they saw a
+series of small courtyards used for the purpose of storing refuse which
+could not be put in the dustbin--bottles, broken crockery, and odd bits
+of rusty iron.  The first thing was to provide the breakfast for the
+following morning.  This their landlady offered to do for them.  The
+next thing was to go to bed utterly wearied and worn out.  They both
+slept soundly, and both woke much refreshed and full of buoyant hope.
+A pleasant and seductive vista lay before them--seductive and pleasant,
+although they were in Nelson Square, as that which we see in one of
+Turner's Italian pictures--a temple at the side, a lake in front and
+beyond it a valley embosomed in woods and mountains, basking in golden
+light.
+
+They planned the day.  Miriam had to lay in her stock of eatables, and
+of course must call on her aunt.  At twenty minutes to eight Andrew
+started.  The way was easy to find, and he was at his uncle's five
+minutes before his time.  The shopmen were already there, and Andrew
+had rather a rough greeting.
+
+"An't yer brought yer warming-pan with yer, young 'un?  You'll find it
+cool a sittin' still all day long."
+
+Andrew then found out that the desk up aloft was really his appointed
+post.
+
+"Don't yer be so free, Bill," said the other; "he's the govnor's nevvy.
+You'd better mind what you're at, old man, now we've got the nevvy
+here."
+
+"I suppose you'll be a pardner next week," continued the first with a
+bow.
+
+The truth was that Mr. Dabb had told his men that he was expecting a
+nephew "of his missus's," and that "he was took on as a kind of charity
+like."
+
+Mr. Dabb now appeared.
+
+"Here you are--all right.  Sharp's the word--that's my motter.  Keep on
+your coat and hat--you'll want 'em, I can tell you.  This isn't a place
+for coddlin', is it, Bill?"  Bill smiled.  "You've got to take the
+money--all ready money here, except a few weeklies.  You get a ticket,
+see as you have the right amount; we keep a duplicate, and so we check
+you.  Things as go in the books you put down.  Three-quarters of an
+hour for your dinner and half-an-hour for tea--not like Cowfold, eh?
+You'll see life here--_life_, my boy;" and Mr. Dabb, full of ham,
+buttered toast, and hot coffee, and feeling very well that morning,
+began to chop with great vigour at the spine of a dead pig suspended by
+its hind-legs.  "Life," he said again--"there isn't such a place in
+London for life as the Borough; and though I say it, there aren't many
+more places in the Borough where there's more life than at Dabb's.  Now
+then, mount."
+
+Andrew assumed his new position.  Fortunately for him, he was, like
+many other youths of his bent, rather quick at arithmetic; Mr. Dabb was
+not very busy, and whatever his faults may have been, was by no means
+disposed to be hard upon a beginner.  Still the day was insufferably
+long, and he rejoiced with a foolish extravagance of delight when the
+hour came for going home.  There was nothing exhilarating in the
+streets through which he raced: there was no certainty of anything
+particularly pleasant in Nelson Square, and the morrow would inevitably
+be as to-day.  But still he was glad; and as for the morrow, he did not
+see it.
+
+At three o'clock Miriam called on her aunt.  As she passed through the
+shop she saw her brother, but it was full of people, and she could not
+speak to him.  She found Mrs. Babb still in bed with her nerves in
+disorder; other things were in disorder too, and Miriam particularly
+wondered at the dishevelled condition of Mrs. Dabb's hair, nightcaps
+being the custom at Cowfold for all people who were not girls nor boys.
+Miriam was not an orderly person, as we know, but Mrs. Dabb's room was
+a surprise to her.  In one corner was an old green sofa, on which
+clothes were thrown; on the top of the clothes was a tray with some
+half-eaten bread and butter, a piece of bacon, and some tea things--we
+will not, however, go any further.
+
+"I am glad you've come, my dear," said Mrs. Dabb, "although I am afraid
+I shall not be able to see you so often as I could wish, for my health
+is not good, and when I am better there is so much to be done."
+
+Miriam thought that if this might be true, there was no reason to put
+it in the forefront of the reception.
+
+"Your brother, I believe, will do very well.  It must be a great relief
+to him to be freed from his mechanical labours in a provincial town,
+and to find himself in a more extended circle."
+
+Miriam thanked her aunt, and said that she was sure her uncle would be
+kind.
+
+"Yes, he will be kind; although I should not say that kindness is the
+one thing prominent in him.  In such large commercial undertakings the
+feelings are not developed.  I am often sensible of it.  There is no
+response in your uncle to what is best in me, yet I must not complain.
+Perhaps if we had children it might have been different, and yet who
+knows?  Maternal solicitude might have destroyed the sentiment I now
+possess.  But I must not weary myself by talking--I must bid you
+good-bye.  Come again soon."
+
+Miriam rose, ventured to kiss her aunt, and departed.
+
+Three months passed, and Miriam and Andrew agreed that there was
+vegetation in London as well as in Cowfold.  They began indeed to think
+it was even a little greener in Cowfold than in Nelson Square itself.
+
+Miriam had been out for walks--she had been as far as Regent Street;
+but Regent Street began to lose its charms, especially as she had no
+companions.  Her landlady, Miss Tippit, was a demure little person of
+about fifty years, but looking rather younger, for her hair was light.
+It was always drawn very tightly over her forehead, and with extreme
+precision under her ears.  She invariably wore a very tight-fitting
+black gown, and as her lips too were somewhat tightly set, she was a
+very tight Miss Tippit altogether.  It was necessary to be so, for
+beyond an annuity of 20 pounds a year, she had no means of support save
+letting her lodgings.  She was very good, but her goodness appeared to
+lack spontaneity.  It seemed as if she did everything, and even
+bestowed her rare kisses, under instructions from her conscience, and
+every tendency to effusiveness was checked as a crime.  Yet the truth
+was that she was naturally kind and even generous, but disbelieving in
+nature on the whole, she never would sanction any natural instinct
+unless she could give it the form of duty.  She was an unpleasant
+companion at times, because she often felt bound to "set things right,"
+and made suggestions which were resented as interference.  When she
+visited her friends, for she had two or three, she invariably assumed
+the reins, and was provocative by reason of her unauthorised
+admonitions to the servants or remarks upon defective management.
+Another odd thing was that Miss Tippit was a Christian.  She went to
+church regularly twice every Sunday, and it was always her parish
+church.  She might have found something to do her more good if she had
+gone farther afield; but she considered it her duty to go to her own
+church as she called it.  The parson was not eminent, belonged to no
+school, and said nothing which was specially helpful; but Miss Tippit
+listened with respect, heard the Bible read, did her best to join in
+the hymns with her little thin voice, and prayed the church prayers.
+She contrived, through what she heard, and what she sang, and what she
+prayed, not only to provide herself with an explanation which she did
+not doubt of the here and hereafter--an explanation which would not
+probably have been secure against Strauss--but she obtained a few
+principles by which she regulated this present life--principles of
+extreme importance, which scepticism must admit if the world is not to
+go to ruin.  In the church, too, in the corner against the wall, when
+the music sounded, or when the voice of the priest was heard asking for
+the Divine mercy, the heart of Miss Tippit often moved, notwithstanding
+the compression of her tight black dress, and something seemed to rebel
+in her throat against her bonnet-strings.  What did she think in those
+sacred moments?  Let us not profane her worship with too minute
+inquiry.  Whatever she thought, those emotions were perfectly valid.
+She might be snappish, limited, and say ugly things during half the
+week, but there was something underneath all that which was in
+communication with the skies.  The church was the only mental or
+spiritual education which Miss Tippit received.  Books she never
+read--she had not time; and if she tried to read one she was instantly
+seized with a curious fidgetiness--directly she sat down with a volume
+in her hand it was just as if things went all awry, and compelled her
+instantly to rise and adjust them.  In church all this fidgetiness
+vanished, and no household cares intruded.  It was strange, considering
+her temper, and how people generally carry their secular world with
+them wherever they go, but so it was.  There was a secret in her
+history, her friends said, for though they knew nothing of her little
+bit of private religion, and although she never admitted a soul into
+the little oratory where the image of her Saviour hung, everybody was
+aware that there was "a something about her" which took her out of the
+class to which she externally and by much of her ordinary conduct
+appeared to belong, and of course the theory was an early love
+disappointment, the only theory which the average human intellect is
+capable of forming in such cases.  It was utterly baseless; and Miss
+Tippit was touched with this faint touch of supernal grace just because
+her Maker had so decreed.
+
+Miriam disliked Miss Tippit on account of her primness and old
+maidishness, and the frequent hints which she gave to keep her room in
+order.  Miriam had picked up an epithet, perhaps from her aunt, perhaps
+from a book which seemed exactly to describe Miss Tippit--she was
+"conventional;" and having acquired this epithet, her antipathy to Miss
+Tippit increased every time she used it.  It was really not coin of the
+realm, but gilded brass--a forgery; and the language is full of such
+forgeries, which we continually circulate, and worst of all, pass off
+upon ourselves.  Thus it happened that although Miss Tippit would have
+been glad to do Miriam many a service, her offers were treated with,
+something like disdain, and were instantly withdrawn.  The only other
+lodgers in the house were an old gentleman and his wife on the first
+floor, whom Miriam never saw, and about whom she knew nothing.
+
+Andrew at last began to feel the wear of London life.  When he came
+home in the evening he suffered from an exhaustion which he never felt
+in Cowfold.  It was not that weariness of the muscles which was a
+pleasure after a game at cricket or football, but a nervous distress
+which craved a stimulant.  He had confined himself hitherto to a single
+glass of beer at supper, but this was not enough, and a glass of whisky
+and water afterwards was added to keep company with the pipe.  By
+degrees also he dropped into a public-house as he left Mr. Dabb's for
+just threepennyworth to support him on his way.  Frequently when he
+went there he met a man of about thirty who also was apparently
+enjoying a modest threepennyworth to help him home or help him away
+from it or help him to do something which he could not do without it,
+and Andrew and he began gradually, under the influence of their
+threepennyworths, to talk to one another.  He was clean shaven, had
+glossy black hair, a white and somewhat sad face, was particularly neat
+but rather shabby, and, what at first was a puzzle to Andrew, looked as
+if he was going to begin work rather than leave it, for his boots were
+evidently just blacked.  He was a music-hall comic singer.  His father
+and mother--fathers and mothers, even the best of them, will do such
+things--had given him a fairish schooling, but had never troubled
+themselves to train him for any occupation.  They stuck their heads in
+the sand, believed something would turn up, and trusted in Providence.
+Considering the kind and quantity of trust which is placed in
+Providence, the most ambitious person would surely not aspire to its
+high office, and it may be pardoned for having laid down the inflexible
+rule to ignore without exception the confidence reposed in it.  Poor
+George Montgomery found himself at eighteen without any outlook,
+although he was a gentleman, and his father was a clergyman.  The only
+appointment he could procure was that of temporary clerk in the War
+Office during a "scare"--"a merely provisional arrangement," as the
+Rev. Mr. Montgomery explained, when inquiries were made after George.
+The scare passed away; the temporary clerks were discharged; the father
+died; and George, still more unfitted for any ordinary occupation, came
+down at last, by a path which it is not worth while to trace, to earn a
+living by delighting a Southwark audience nightly with his fine
+baritone voice, good enough for a ballad in those latitudes, and good
+enough indeed for something much better if it had been properly
+exercised under a master.  He was not downright dissolute, but his
+experience with his father, who was weak and silly, had given him a
+distaste for what he called religion; and he was loose, as might be
+expected.  Still, he was not so loose as to have lost his finer
+instincts altogether, for he had some.  He read a good deal, mostly
+fiction, played the organ, and actually conducted the musical part of a
+service every Sunday, heathen as he was.  His vagrant life of
+excitement begot in him a love of liquor, which he took merely to quiet
+him, but unfortunately the dose required strengthening every now and
+then.  He was mostly in debt; prided himself on not dishonouring
+virtuous women--a boast, nevertheless, not entirely justifiable; and
+through his profession had acquired a slightly histrionic manner,
+especially when he was reciting, an art in which he was accomplished.
+He found out that Andrew had a sister, and he gave him a couple of
+tickets for an entertainment which had been got up by some well-meaning
+people to draw the poor to his church.  They were tickets for the
+respectable end of the schoolroom, and Andrew having obtained
+permission to leave an hour earlier, took Miriam in her very best
+dress, and with one or two little additional and specially purchased
+articles of finery.  It never entered Mr. Montgomery's head to invite
+even Andrew to the music hall.  He was ashamed of it, and he saw that
+Andrew was not exactly the person to be taken there.  Mr. Montgomery
+had two classes of songs, both of which found favour with his ordinary
+nightly audience.  One was coarse, and the other sentimental.
+
+Of the coarse, his always applauded "Hampstead-Heath Donkey and what he
+thought of his Customers" might be taken as a sample, but there was
+just as vigorous clapping when he produced his "Sackmaker's Dream," and
+this he now sang.  Miriam was much affected by it, and dwelt upon it as
+the three--the singer, Andrew, and herself--walked home to their
+lodgings whither Mr. Montgomery had been invited to supper.
+
+"Did you write the Sackmaker's Dream yourself?" she asked, as they went
+along.
+
+"Yes; just by way of a change.  It does not pay to sing nothing but
+comic stuff."
+
+"It is very pathetic.  Is it true?"
+
+"Oh, I don't quite know.  Founded on fact, as they say, dressed up a
+bit by the author," and Mr. Montgomery laughed.
+
+"But how did you ever hear of such a thing?"
+
+"Oh, I've heard a good many strange things since I've been knocking
+about town."
+
+"Then you had some particular person in your eye when you were
+composing it?"
+
+"Yes, partly, but not much of her," and Mr. Montgomery laughed again.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"How inquisitive you are.  Well, to tell you the truth, no more than
+this, that one night I saw one of these women coming out of a sack
+factory.  She looked awfully wretched, and I made up all the rest."
+
+Miriam was much astonished.  She was actually in company with an
+author, and with one who could invent scenes, descriptions, and
+characters like those in the novels of which she was now so fond.  Mr.
+Montgomery was a marvel to her.  He, too, was somewhat struck with
+Miriam; with her beauty, and with a certain freshness in her
+observations; but a man who had lived as he had lived in London is not
+likely to admire any woman with much fervour, and indeed the incapacity
+for genuine admiration of women is one of the strongest arguments
+against such a life.
+
+They had their supper, and after supper some whisky was produced, and
+Andrew and Montgomery smoked.
+
+"Talking about sackmakers," said Montgomery, "I can tell you a true
+story of one, quite true, every word of it.  I knew a fellow who had
+been awfully wild when he was young, but he was converted, as they call
+it, and turned city missionary.  He came to know in this way one of
+these sackmaking women.  She was above the usual run, well-behaved, and
+very good-looking.  He fell desperately in love with her, and she with
+him, but he always thought she held back a little.  At last she told
+him she had lived with a man, and that he had left her.  The missionary
+said he did not care, and would marry her, but she refused.  She was
+bound, she said, and nothing could get that notion out of her head.
+The missionary was in despair; he was trained for foreign service, and
+went to India.  There he married, well enough, I was told, and was
+happy; but the sackmaker was never forgotten.  He became the minister
+of a big chapel in Calcutta, but he always somehow, through somebody in
+London, managed to find out what the girl was doing.  When he was
+forty-five, his wife died.  They had no children, and he came back to
+England.  One fine morning he knocked at his old friend's door.  You
+may imagine their meeting!  The man with whom she had lived was dead.
+The missionary and she were married.  He gave up his preaching; he had
+saved up a bit of money, and took his wife and himself off to America.
+What do you think of her, Andrew?"
+
+Andrew's notions on social and moral questions were what are commonly
+called "views."  They were not thoughts, and furthermore they were
+"average views."  Having had some whisky, his views were very
+average--that is to say, precisely what is usual and customary.  "I
+suppose it was the best thing he could do," he somewhat sleepily
+replied.
+
+"The best thing he could do!" retorted Miriam, with much scorn.  "I
+would have worn that woman like a jewel, if I had been her husband.  He
+ought never to have married his first wife."
+
+Six months afterwards, the position of affairs in the little household
+in Nelson Square had changed.  Andrew, finding that vegetation in
+London was very slow work, had contracted the habit of taking whisky a
+little more frequently, and had even--not unnoticed by Mr.
+Dabb--provided himself with a small flask, from which he was accustomed
+to solace himself by "nips" during business hours when he thought he
+was not seen.  Once or twice he had been late in the morning, and had
+been reminded by Mr. Dabb.  "Sharp's the word in my establishment,
+nephew, and I show no favour."
+
+Mr. Montgomery, too, had become a constant visitor at the Tacchis' on
+Sunday, and Miriam had found herself beginning on the Monday morning to
+count the hours till the next Sunday should arrive.  She had told Mr.
+Montgomery that she should like to hear him sing in his own hall, but
+he did not receive the proposal very graciously.
+
+"They are a rough set that go there, and you would not like to mix with
+them."
+
+"If you do not mind, why should I?  Besides, could you not find some
+place apart where Andrew and myself could be quiet?"
+
+"You would object to some of the songs; they are not adapted for your
+ears."
+
+"You know nothing about my ears.  I do not suppose there will be
+anything wrong.  Come now, promise."
+
+Mr. Montgomery thought a little, and reflected that he could easily
+obtain a secluded seat; and as for the programme, he could perhaps for
+once exclude everything offensive.  He said he would write and fix an
+evening.
+
+"Andrew is out all day; perhaps you had better send the note to me, so
+that I may have more time to make arrangements."  Miriam usually said
+what she meant; but this was not what she meant.  She was possessed now
+by a passion which was stronger than her tendency to speak the truth.
+She longed for the pleasure of a letter to herself in Mr. Montgomery's
+own writing.  The next morning, when she went downstairs, she looked
+anxiously at the breakfast table.  It was utterly impossible that he
+could have written, but she thought there was a chance.  She listened
+for the postman's knock all day, but nothing came.  How could it be
+otherwise, seeing that Mr. Montgomery must go to the music hall first.
+She knew he must go, and yet she listened.  Reason has so little to do
+with the conduct of life, even in situations in which its claim is
+incontestable.  The next day she had a right to expect, but she
+expected in vain.
+
+Mr. Montgomery was not a stone, but he saw no reason why he should be
+in a hurry.  Miriam was a bewitching creature, but he had been
+frequently bewitched, and had recovered.  The notion, of course, that
+he was wrecking Miriam's peace of mind by delaying a little business
+note, or by omitting to fix the earliest possible moment for the visit,
+was too absurd to present itself to him.  At last he wrote, telling
+Miss Tacchi that he hoped to have the pleasure of seeing her and Andrew
+at the hall on the day following.  He would call for them both.  Miriam
+had not stirred from home since she last saw him, and was in the little
+back room when the letter arrived.  Miss Tippit brought it to her, and
+she took it with an affected air of total unconcern.
+
+"Thank you, Miss Tippit.  I am sorry to see you looking so poorly."
+
+"Thank you, Miss Tacchi; I am not well by any means," and Miss Tippit
+departed.
+
+Miriam had not latterly inquired after Miss Tippit's health, but being
+excited and happy, she not only inquired, but actually felt a genuine
+interest in Miss Tippit's welfare.  She read the note twice--there was
+nothing in it; but she took it upstairs and read it again in her
+bedroom, and finally locked it up in her desk, putting it in a little
+secret drawer which opened with a spring.  She had in her possession
+something in his hand--she was going out with him; and the outlook from
+her back window over the tiles was not to be surpassed by that down a
+Devonshire glen in mid-summer, with Devonshire azure on the sea.
+
+The evening came, and Mr. Montgomery called before Andrew had arrived.
+Miriam was, nevertheless, ready.  She asked him if he would like
+anything; could she get him any tea?  But he had prepared himself for
+his night's work by a drop of whisky, and did not care for tea.  He did
+not, however, suggest any more whisky; he was always indeed
+particularly careful not to overstep the mark before his performances,
+whatever he might do afterwards.
+
+"Really, Mr. Montgomery, this is too kind of you to take the trouble to
+come here out of your way for Andrew and myself."
+
+"It is not out of my way, Miss Tacchi, and I do not believe that you
+can honestly say that I, who have been idling about for three or four
+hours, could find it a trouble to be here."
+
+"Do you think I deal in hypocritical compliments?"
+
+"Of course not; but we are all of us liars a little bit--women more
+than men; and perhaps they are never so delightful as when they are
+telling their little bits of falsehoods.  They speak the truth, but
+they _do_ lie--truth and lie, lie and truth--the truest truth, the most
+lying lie;" and Mr. Montgomery took up a couple of wax ornamental
+apples which were on the mantelpiece and tossed them up alternately
+with one hand with the greatest dexterity, replacing them on the
+mantelpiece with a smile.
+
+At that moment Andrew appeared at the door, and in a few moments they
+were all three ready.  Just as they were departing, a gentleman came
+downstairs.
+
+"Pardon me," he said, speaking to Miriam, "do you live in this house?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Miss Tippit is very dangerously ill.  I am her doctor.  I do not like
+to leave her alone with the little girl.  I am going to fetch a nurse,
+and will probably be able to get one in an hour.  Do you mind waiting
+till I return?"
+
+Miriam was almost beside herself.  She was not simply vexed, but she
+cursed Miss Tippit, and would have raged at her if the presence of
+others had not restrained her.
+
+"It is extremely awkward.  I have a most pressing engagement."
+
+Andrew stared.  He did not see anything particularly pressing.
+
+"I will wait for you, Miriam."
+
+She now hated Andrew as much as she did Miss Tippit.
+
+"Absurd to talk of waiting.  You know nothing about it.  Go on.  Don't
+stay for me.  Of course I must give it up altogether;" and she clutched
+at her bonnet-strings, and tore her bonnet off her head.  The doctor
+was amazed, and doubted for a moment whether it would not be better to
+do without her help.
+
+"It doesn't matter, Miss Tacchi," said Mr. Montgomery; "I shall not be
+on for an hour and a half, but I must be there.  If you will come with
+your brother, you will be in plenty of time."
+
+She sullenly went upstairs, and Andrew remained below.  When she
+entered the room she shut the door with some vehemence, and the little
+maid-of-all-work, who was at the head of the bed, came to meet her.
+
+"Oh, if you please, Miss Tacchi, the doctor said she was to be kept so
+quiet.  Poor Miss Tippit; she is very bad, Miss; I think she's
+insensible."
+
+"You need not tell me what to do.  I know just as well as yourself."
+
+The sufferer lay perfectly still, and apparently unconscious.  Miriam
+looked at her for a moment; and felt rebuked, but went and sat by the
+fire.
+
+"I don't mind doing anything for her," she said to herself, "although,
+she is no particular friend of mine, and not a person whom it is a
+pleasure to assist; but I really don't know whether, in justice to
+myself and Andrew, I ought to remain, seeing how seldom we get a chance
+of enjoying ourselves, and how important a change is for both of us."
+
+There is no person whom we can more easily deceive--no, not even the
+silliest gull--than ourselves.  We are always perfectly willing to deny
+ourselves to any extent, or even to ruin ourselves, but unfortunately
+it does not seem right we should do so.  It is not selfishness, but a
+moral obligation which intervenes.
+
+The man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves
+was left half-dead.  The priest and the Levite, who came and looked and
+passed by on the other side, assuredly convinced themselves that most
+likely the swooning wretch was not alive.  They were on most important
+professional errands.  _Ought_ they to run the risk of entirely
+upsetting those solemn, engagements by incurring the Levitical penalty
+of contact with a corpse?  There was but a mere chance that they could
+do any good.  This person was entirely unknown to them; his life might
+not be worth saving, for he might be a rascal; and, on the other hand,
+there were sacred duties--duties to their God.  What priest or Levite,
+with proper religious instincts, could possibly hesitate?
+
+Was the Miriam who chafed at her disappointment, and invented
+casuistical arguments to excuse herself, the same Miriam who walked
+over to see Mortimer, Wake, and Collins on behalf of Mr. Cutts?
+Precisely the same.
+
+The doctor kept his engagement, and in an hour returned with a nurse.
+When Miriam saw she was relieved, she became compassionate.
+
+"I am so grieved," she said to the doctor, "to see Miss Tippit so ill.
+Is there really _nothing_ I can do for her?"
+
+"Nothing, madam."
+
+Miriam, so grieved, rushed downstairs wild with excitement and delight,
+laid hold of Andrew, half asleep, twitched him merrily out of the
+chair, and they were off.  In a few minutes they were at the hall, and
+found that they were in ample time to hear Mr. Montgomery's first song.
+
+He had taken particular care not to include anything offensive or even
+broad, so that one of his audience who eat below Miriam and Andrew
+exclaimed in their hearing that it was "a d----d pious night," and
+wondered "what Mont's little game was."
+
+One of Mr. Montgomery's most telling serious songs was sung in the
+costume of a sailor.  There was a description of his wanderings over
+the "salt, salt sea," which rhymed with something "free," as it always
+does, and there was a slightly veiled account of his exploits amongst
+the damsels of different countries, always harmless, so at least ran
+the version for the night, and yet he swore when he returned that
+
+  "My lovely Poll at Portsmouth,
+    When in my arms I caught her,
+  Was worth a hundred foreign gals
+    On the t'other side the water"--
+
+a sentiment which was tumultuously applauded, although few of the men
+present had travelled, and those who were married were probably not so
+rapturously in love with their own domestic Polls.
+
+Andrew was not quite comfortable, but Miriam applauded with the rest.
+
+"How cleverly," she said, "he manages, although he is a gentleman, born
+and bred, to adapt himself to the people beneath him.  It is a pity,
+though, that he hasn't a better sphere for his talents."
+
+When they came out, Mr. Montgomery accompanied them home; and as it was
+night, and the streets were crowded with rather rough and disorderly
+persons, he offered Miriam his arm, Andrew walking on the other side of
+her.
+
+"I was half ashamed, Miss Tacchi, that you should see me go through
+such a performance."
+
+"There was nothing objectionable in it; and for that matter, we all
+have to do what we do not quite like.  I am sure it was very good of
+you to let us come, and I enjoyed myself very much.  By the way, when
+you sing any of the songs, which are not comic, do you feel them?  I
+often wonder if a professional gentleman who can produce such an effect
+on others, produces anything like the same effect on himself."
+
+"It depends upon the mood.  Do you know now that when I was singing
+to-night that stupid thing about the sailor and his Portsmouth Poll, it
+all at once came to my mind that no Portsmouth Poll would ever wait for
+me.  Did you ever hear anything so ridiculously absurd--such a bit of
+maudlin nonsense.  I laughed at myself afterwards.  It gave me a good,
+idea, though.  I'll compose a burlesque, and the refrain shall be,
+weeping--
+
+  "No Po-o-ortsmouth Poll is a-waiting for me."
+
+"I don't think it was absurd," said Miriam gravely.
+
+"You don't?" he replied, in a suddenly changed tone.
+
+"No."
+
+"The path is rather narrow here; you had better come a little closer."
+He took her hand, and pulled her arm a little further through his own.
+Was it fancy or not?  He thought he detected that the pressure on his
+arm was increased.  When they reached Nelson Square they had supper,
+and after supper Andrew and Montgomery, according to custom, enjoyed
+themselves over the tobacco and whisky.  Miriam knew well enough, long
+before they separated, that it was time for Andrew at least to go to
+bed, but she was unwilling to break up the party.  At last, when it was
+past one, Mr. Montgomery rose.  Andrew had had more whisky than was
+good for him, and Miriam went with their guest to the door.  He had a
+strong head, and could drink a good deal of liquor without confusing
+it, but liquor altered him nevertheless.  To-night it made him more
+serious, and yet, strangely enough, strengthened the evil tendency in
+him to cross his seriousness with instantaneous levity.  He was much
+given to mocking his own emotions, not only to others, but to himself.
+When the door opened, he looked out into the night, and if there had
+been a lamp there Miriam would have seen that for a moment his face was
+very sad, but he at once recovered, or seemed to recover.
+
+"Ah, well, I must be off.  It is dark, it is late, and it rains, and
+alas
+
+  "No Po-o-ortsmouth Poll is a-waiting for me."
+
+Miriam was silent.  She pitied him profoundly, and thought it was
+nothing but pity.
+
+"Good-bye, Miss Tacchi."
+
+He took her hand in his, held it a little longer than was necessary for
+an ordinary farewell, then raised it to his lips and kissed it.  She
+did not at once release him.  "Good-bye," she said.  He had moved a
+little farther from her, and was descending the step, but the hands
+still held.  One more "good-bye," and they slowly parted their grasp,
+as things part under a strain which are not in simple contact, but
+intermingle their fibres.
+
+Mr. Montgomery in a quarter of an hour was at home, and in another
+quarter of an hour was asleep.  Miriam, on the contrary, lay awake till
+daylight, with her brain on fire, and when she woke it was nine
+o'clock.  Coming downstairs as soon as she was dressed, she was greatly
+surprised to find that Andrew was still in bed.  She was much alarmed,
+went to his room, and roused him.  He complained of headache and
+sickness, and wished to remain at home for the day, but Miriam would
+not listen to it--rather unwisely, for it would have been better if he
+had not appeared before Mr. Dabb that morning.  Mr. Dabb had in fact
+been much provoked of late by small irregularities in Andrew's
+attendance, and had at last made up his mind that on the next occasion
+he would tell him, notwithstanding their relationship, that his
+services were no longer required.
+
+"Nice time to show yourself, Mr. Andrew," observed Mr. Dabb, pulling
+out his watch.
+
+"I was not well."
+
+"I've got a word or two to say to you.  Perhaps we'd better go into the
+parlour."
+
+Thither Mr. Dabb went, and Andrew followed him.
+
+"Look you here, Mr. Andrew, I know perfectly well what is the matter
+with you.  You don't think that I haven't got a nose, do you?  You are
+my nephew, but just for that very reason you shan't be with me.  I'm
+not agoing to have it said that I've got a relative in my business who
+drinks.  I won't turn you out into the street, as I might have done,
+with nothing but what was due to you.  There's two months' pay, and now
+we're quits.  You take my advice, and let this be a lesson to you, or
+you'll go from bad to worse."
+
+Mr. Dabb produced the money, and handed it to Andrew.  He was
+confounded, and almost dumb with terror.  At last he found words, and
+implored his uncle to forgive him.
+
+"Forgive you?  Yes, I forgive you, if that will do you any good; but
+business is business, and what I've settled to do that I do.  Now,
+then, you'd better go; I can't stand here any longer.  I don't bear any
+ill-will to you, but it's of no use your talking."
+
+He opened the door, and in another minute Andrew was in the street.
+
+Miriam heard his story.  She had anticipated it, and for the moment she
+said nothing.  Her first care was to prevent her uncle or aunt from
+communicating with Cowfold.  She foresaw that her father, if he knew
+her brother's disgrace, might possibly stop the allowance.  She at once
+put on her bonnet and called at the shop.  She made no appeal for
+reconsideration of the sentence--all she asked was that there should be
+silence.  To this Uncle Dabb assented willingly, for Miriam was half a
+favourite with him, and he even went so far as somewhat to apologise
+for what he had done.
+
+"But you know," said he, "this is a shop.  As I have told him over and
+over again, business is business.  I couldn't help it, and it's just as
+well as he should have a sharpish lesson at first--nothing like that
+for curing a man."
+
+Mr. Dabb unfortunately did not know how much it takes to cure a man of
+anything.
+
+Miriam felt it would be graceless not to see her aunt, although she had
+no particular desire for an interview just then.
+
+"My dear Miriam," began that lady, without waiting for a word, "I do
+regret so what has happened.  I am so sorry I could not prevent it, but
+I never interfere in your uncle's commercial transactions, and
+reciprocally he never intrudes into my sphere.  It is most
+unfortunate--what do you think we can do to arrest this propensity in
+your brother?"
+
+Miriam was silent.
+
+"It is astonishing how much may be done by cultivating the finer
+emotions.  Your brother has always seemed to me not sufficiently
+susceptible.  Supposing I were to lend you a book of my favourite
+poetry, and you were to read to him, and endeavour to excite an
+interest in him for higher and better things--who knows?"
+
+Miriam had no special professional acquaintance with the theory of
+salvation, but she instinctively felt that a love of drink was not to
+be put down by the "Keepsake" in red silk.
+
+She was still silent.  At last she said--"I am much obliged to you,
+aunt; I will take anything you may like to lend.  You have a good deal
+of influence, doubtless, over uncle.  If you can persuade him to say
+what he can in case application is made to him for a character, I shall
+think it very kind of you."
+
+"My dear Miriam, I have no influence over your uncle.  His is not a
+nature upon which I can exert myself.  I think some pieces in this
+would be suitable;" and Mrs. Dabb offered Miriam a volume of Mrs.
+Hemans' works.
+
+Miriam took it, and bade her aunt good-bye.
+
+She was now face to face with a great trouble, and she had to encounter
+it alone, and with no weapons and with no armour save those which
+Nature provides.  She was not specially an exile from civilisation;
+churches and philosophers had striven and demonstrated for thousands of
+years, and yet she was no better protected than if Socrates, Epictetus,
+and all ecclesiastical establishments from the time of Moses had never
+existed.
+
+She did not lecture her brother, for she had no materials for a sermon.
+She called him a fool when she came home; and having said this, she had
+nothing more to say, except to ask him bitterly what he meant to do.
+What could he do?--a poor, helpless, weak creature, half a stranger in
+London; and without expostulating with her for her roughness with him,
+he sat still and cried.  It was useless to think of obtaining a
+situation like the one he had lost.  He could prove no experience, he
+dared not refer to his uncle, and consequently there was nothing before
+him but a return to clockmaking, or rather clock repairing.  Here
+again, however, he was foiled, for his apprenticeship was barely
+concluded, and he had never taken to the business with sufficient
+seriousness to become proficient.  After one or two inquiries,
+therefore, he found that in this department also he was useless.
+
+The affection of Miriam for her brother, never very strong, was not
+increased by his ill-luck.  She began, in fact, to dislike him because
+he was unfortunate.  She imagined that her dislike was due to his
+faults, and every now and then she abused him for them; but his faults
+would have been forgotten if he had been prosperous.  She hated misery,
+and not only misery in the abstract, but miserable weak creatures.  She
+was ready enough, as we have seen, to right a wrong, especially if the
+wrong was championed by those whom she despised; but for simple
+infirmity, at least in human beings, she had no more mercy than the
+wild animals which destroy any one of their tribe whom they find
+disabled.  There was more than a chance, too, that Andrew would
+interfere with her own happiness.  If he could not get anything to do,
+they must leave London, for living on the allowance from Cowfold was
+impossible.  Reproof, when it is mixed with personal hostility,
+although the person reproving and the person reproved may be
+unconscious of it, is never persuasive; and as a tendency to whisky and
+water requires a very powerful antidote, it is not surprising that
+Andrew grew rather worse than better.
+
+One evening Montgomery called.  He had come to ask them both to the
+hall.  He was in a very quiet, rational humour, for he had not as yet
+had his threepennyworth.  Andrew had been out all day, had come home
+none the better for his excursion, and had gone to bed.
+
+"Your brother not at home?"
+
+"Yes; but he is not very well, and is upstairs."
+
+"I've brought you a couple of tickets for next week.  I hope you will
+be able to go; that is to say, if you were not disgusted when you were
+last there."
+
+"Disgusted!  I am afraid, Mr. Montgomery, you have a very poor opinion
+of my 'gusts' and disgusts."
+
+It was unfortunate for Miriam that she had no work before her, such as
+sewing or knitting.  She abominated it; but in conversation, especially
+between a man and a woman who find themselves alone, it is useful.  It
+not only relieves awkwardness, but it prevents too much edge and
+directness during the interview.
+
+"Well, you might reasonably have been offended with both the songs and
+the company."
+
+"Neither.  As to the company, I did not see much of it, thanks to your
+kindness in getting us such a good place; and as to the songs, to say
+nothing of the way in which they were sung, there was a
+straight-forwardness about them that I liked.
+
+"I don't quite know what you mean."
+
+"Well," said Miriam, with a little laugh, which was not exactly the
+light effervescence of gaiety, "your people, if they love one another,
+say so outright, without any roundaboutness."
+
+Mr. Montgomery was puzzled.  He did not quite know what to make out of
+this girl.  There was something in her way of speaking and in her
+frankness which offered itself to him, and yet again there was
+something which stopped him from attempting any liberties.  She did not
+classify herself in any of the species with which he was familiar.
+
+At last he said--"You object, then, to all roundaboutness in such
+matters."
+
+"Well, yes; but perhaps I might be misunderstood.  I should like people
+to be plain both ways, about their dislikes as well as their likes."
+
+"Good gracious me, Miss Tacchi, what a pretty world you would live in.
+There would be no fun in it.  Half the amusement of life consists in
+trying to find out what we really think of one another underneath all
+our fine speeches."
+
+"I would rather amuse myself in some other way.  I have often dreamt of
+an island in which everybody should say exactly what was in his mind.
+Of course it would be very shocking, but I do really believe that in
+the end we should be happier.  It would be delightful to me if my
+cousins were to tell me, 'We hate you--you are dirty, disagreeable, and
+ugly; and we do not intend to call upon you any more.'  For mind,
+people would then believe in expressions of affection.  They do not
+believe in them now."
+
+"Yes; your island would be all very well for attractive young women,
+but what would it be for poor devils such as I am.  I _know_ that
+nobody can care twopence for me, but the illusion of politeness is
+pleasant.  It is a wonderful thing how we enjoy being cheated, though
+we know we are cheated.  A man will give a cabman sixpence more than
+his fare for the humbug of a compliment, and I confess that if people
+were to say to my face what I am certain they say behind my back, I
+should hang myself.  Illusion, delusion--delusion, illusion," he hummed
+it as if it were the refrain of a ballad; "it is nothing but that from
+the day we are born till the day we die, and the older we become the
+more preposterously are we deluded, until at last--but the Lord--to
+think of preaching," and he laughed--"you must have made me do it;" and
+he rose and played with his favourite toys, the wax apples, pitching
+them up to the ceiling alternately and catching them in one hand.  "I
+must be off."
+
+Miriam did not appear to take any notice,
+
+"Pray," said he, "if you lived in this island of which you dream, would
+you tell me you hated me?  I am beginning to be rather nervous."
+
+"We are not living in it just yet."
+
+"But in one just as disagreeable, for it is pouring with rain."
+
+Miriam gave a sudden start.  She unconsciously looked that the
+conversation would prolong itself in the same interior strain.
+Reference to the outside world was impossible to her just then, and
+that Mr. Montgomery was capable of it was a shock like that of cold
+water.  She came to herself, and went to the window.
+
+"Must you go out in this storm?"
+
+"Must; and what is more, I haven't got a minute to spare.  I may take
+it for granted, then, you and Andrew will come."
+
+"Yes, certainly."
+
+He hastily put on his coat; shook hands--nothing more--and was off.
+
+Miriam ran upstairs into her bedroom, went to the little box in which
+she kept her treasures, unlocked it, took out the little note--the only
+note she had ever had from him--read it again and again, and then tore
+it into twenty pieces, each one of which she picked up and tried to put
+together.  She then threw herself on the bed, and for the first time in
+her life was overcome with hysterical tears.  She dared not confess to
+herself what she wanted.  She would have liked to cast herself at his
+feet; but notwithstanding her disbelief in form and ceremony, she could
+not do it.  She cursed the check which had held her so straitly while
+she was talking with him, and cursed him that he dealt with her so
+lightly.  The continued sobbing at last took the heat out of her, and
+she rose from her bed, collected the pieces of the note, went
+downstairs, and put them one by one deliberately in the fire.
+
+It was time now that they should seriously consider how they stood.
+Andrew had nothing to do, and the wages paid him in advance were nearly
+exhausted.  They decided that they would move into cheaper lodgings.
+They had some difficulty in finding any that were decent but they
+obtained three miserable rooms at the top of a house occupied by a man
+who sold firewood and potatoes in one of the streets running out of the
+Blackfriars Road.  They left Miss Tippit without bidding her good-bye,
+for she was still unwell, and in bed.  They actually began to know what
+poverty was, but Miriam as yet did not feel its approach.  There were
+thoughts and hopes in her which protected her against all apprehension
+of the future, although the cloud into which they must almost
+inevitably enter was so immediately in front of her.
+
+The evening came on which she and Andrew were to go to the hall, but
+Andrew had gone out early to look for some employment, and had not
+returned.  Miriam's hatred rose again, and again assumed an outward
+garb of the purest virtue.  She sat for some time in rapid debate with
+herself as to what she dare do.  Even she recoiled a little from going
+to a music hall without her brother, but passion prevailed.  She did
+not simply determine to go knowing it to be wrong, but with great
+earnestness demonstrated to herself that she was right; and then, as a
+kind of sop to any lingering suspicions, left a note on the mantelpiece
+for Andrew, upbraiding him for delay, and directing him to follow.  No
+Andrew appeared.  She now began to feel how strange her position was.
+She might easily before she started have conjectured that Andrew might
+fail, and might have pictured to herself how difficult and awkward it
+would be to sit there throughout the evening alone and return alone;
+but she did not possess the faculty of picturing uncertainties any
+distance ahead, although the present was generally so vivid.  She could
+never say to herself: "Probably this arrangement now proposed will
+break down, and if it does; I shall stand in such and such a situation;
+what, in that situation, ought I to do?"  She had, in fact, no
+strategical faculty--certainly none when temptation was strong.  She
+dreaded turning out into the street with the rough crowd, and she
+wondered if Montgomery would come to her assistance.  The audience
+gradually departed; she was nearly the last, and she determined that
+she would walk round to the door by which she knew Montgomery usually
+left, and try to encounter him casually.  She paced up and down a few
+moments, and he met her.  He was much surprised, and she, with some
+excitement, explained to him that she had left home a little before
+Andrew, expecting him to overtake her, but that she had seen nothing of
+him.
+
+"Of course you will let me accompany you to your lodgings?"
+
+"Thank you; it is very kind of you."
+
+She took the arm he offered her.  She thought she detected he was a
+little unsteady, and after a word or two he became silent.
+
+She was not particularly well acquainted with the district round the
+hall, but she soon perceived that they were not on the straight road
+for her house.
+
+"Is this our nearest way?" she asked.
+
+"No, I can't say it is; but I thought you would not object to just a
+turn round.  It's a lovely night--a lovely night!"
+
+Presently they came into a very shabby street, and he stopped.  The
+cold air had begun to upset him a little.
+
+"These are my quarters," he stammered.  "I'm rather tired, and I should
+think you must be tired too.  Just come in for a moment and have
+something, and then we will go on."
+
+"Oh no, thank you," said Miriam, who was becoming alarmed.  "I must go
+back at once."
+
+"Won't you come?  Do come; just a moment."
+
+But Miriam steadfastly refused.
+
+"Nonsense, come in just for a second till I----" and he used some
+little force to compel her.  She looked round, and without any mental
+process of which she was conscious determining her to action, instantly
+slipped from him, and ran with furious haste.  She inquired her way of
+a policeman, but otherwise she saw nothing, thought nothing, and heard
+nothing till she was at her own door.  She opened it softly--it was
+late; she went into their little parlour, and there lay Andrew on the
+floor.  He had fallen against the fender, his head was cut open, and he
+was senseless.  A half empty whisky bottle told the rest of the story.
+There was nobody stirring--her landlord and landlady were strangers; if
+she called them, and they saw what was the matter, she might have
+summary notice to quit.  What was she to do?  She took some cold water,
+washed his face, unfastened his neckcloth, and sat down.  She imagined
+it was nothing but intoxication, and that in a few hours at most he
+would recover.  So she remained through the dreadful night hearing
+every quarter strike, hearing chance noises in the general quietude, a
+drunken man, a belated cart, and worse than anything, the slow
+awakening between four and five, the whistle of some early workman who
+has to light the engine fire or get the factory ready for starting at
+six--sounds which remind the sleepless watcher that happiness after
+rest is abroad.
+
+She hid the whisky bottle and glass; and as her brother showed no signs
+of recovery, she went to seek advice and help as soon as she heard
+somebody stirring.  The woman of the house, not a bad kind of woman,
+although Miriam had feared her so much, came upstairs instantly.
+Andrew was lifted on the bed, and a messenger was despatched for the
+doctor.  Miriam recognised him at once: he was the doctor who had asked
+her to stay with Miss Tippit.  He said there was concussion of the
+brain--that the patient must be kept quiet, and watched night and day.
+To her surprise, her landlady instantly offered to share the duty with
+her.  A rude, stout, hard person she was, who stood in the shop all day
+long, winter and summer, amidst the potatoes and firewood, with a
+woollen shawl round her neck and over her shoulders.  A rude, stout,
+hard person, we say, was Mrs. Joll, fond of her beer, rather grimy,
+given to quarrel a little with her husband, could use strong language
+at times, had the defects which might be supposed to arise from
+constant traffic with the inhabitants of the Borough, and was utterly
+unintelligent so far as book learning went.  Nevertheless she was well
+read in departments more important perhaps than books in the conduct of
+human life, and in her there was the one thing needful--the one thing
+which, if ever there is to be a Judgment Day, will put her on the right
+hand; when all sorts of scientific people, religious people, students
+of poetry, people with exquisite emotions, will go on the left and be
+damned everlastingly.  Miriam was at once sent to bed, and it was
+arranged that she should take charge during the following night.
+Afterwards the night duty was to fall equally between them.  She was so
+shut up in herself that she did not recognise the full value of Mrs.
+Joll's self-sacrifice, but she did manage to express her thanks, and
+ask how Mrs. Joll could leave the business.
+
+"That's nothing to you, Miss; my gal Maud has a head on her shoulders,
+and can keep an eye on the place downstairs.  Besides, I've allus found
+that at a pinch things will bear a lot of squeezing.  I remember when
+my good man were laid up with the low fever for six weeks, and I had a
+baby a month old, I thought to myself as I should be beaten; but Lord,
+I was young then, and didn't know how much squeezing things will take,
+and I just squeezed through somehow."
+
+"He ain't very strong, is he?" continued Mrs. Joll.  "I don't mean in
+his constitution, but here," and she tapped her head.  "Likes a drop or
+two now and then?"
+
+Miriam was silent.
+
+"Ah! well, as I said about Joll's brother when I was a-nussing of
+him--he was rather a bad lot--it's nothing to me when people are ill
+what they are.  Besides; there ain't so much difference 'twixt any of
+us."
+
+The night came.  Miriam rose and went down to her brother's room.  She
+tried to read, but she could not, and her thoughts were incessantly
+occupied with her own troubles.  Andrew lay stretched before her--he
+might be dying for aught she knew; and yet the prospect of his death
+disturbed her only so far as it interfered with herself.  Montgomery
+was for ever in her mind.  What was he that he should set the soul of
+this girl alight!  He was nothing, but she was something, and he had by
+some curious and altogether unaccountable quality managed to wake her
+slumbering forces.
+
+She was in love with him, but it was not desire alone which had tired
+her, and made her pace up and down Andrew's sick chamber.  Thousands of
+men with the blackest hair, the most piercing eyes, might have passed
+before her, and she would have remained unmoved.  Neither was it love
+as some select souls understand it.  She did not know what it was which
+stirred her; she was hungry, mad, she could not tell why.  Nobody could
+have predicted beforehand that Montgomery was the man to act upon this
+girl so miraculously--nobody could tell, seeing the two together, what
+it was in him which specially excited her--nobody who has made men and
+women, his study would have wasted much time in the inquiry, knowing
+that the affinities, attractions, and repulsions of men and women are
+beyond all our science.
+
+Brutally selfish is love, although so heroically self-sacrificing.
+Miriam thought that if Andrew had not been such an idiot, the
+relationship with Montgomery might have remained undisturbed.  He might
+still have continued to call, but how could she see him now?  The
+sufferer lay there unconscious, pleading for pity, as everything
+lifeless or unconscious seems to plead--no dead dog in a kennel fails
+to be tragic; but Miriam actually hated her brother, and cursed him in
+her heart as a stone over which she had stumbled in the pursuit; of
+something madly coveted but flying before her.
+
+It was midnight.  She went to the window and looked out.  The
+public-houses were being closed, and intoxicated or half-intoxicated
+persons were groping their way homewards.  Suddenly she caught sight of
+one man whom she thought she recognised.  He was with a woman, and his
+arm was round her waist.  Softly she opened the window, and as it was
+only one story high, she caught a full view of him as he came under the
+gaslight.  It was Montgomery beyond a doubt.  He reeled just a trifle,
+and slowly disappeared in the gloom.  The moment he had passed she was
+not quite sure it was he.  She went downstairs in the dark, having
+taken off her shoes to prevent any noise.  She put on her shoes again,
+drew back the bolts softly, left the door upon the latch, and crept out
+into the street.  Swiftly she walked, and in a few moments she was
+within half-a-dozen yards of those whom she followed.  She could not
+help being sure now.  She continued on their track, her whole existence
+absorbed in one single burning point, until she saw the pair disappear
+into a house which she did not know.  She stood stock still, till a
+policeman was close upon her, and roused her from her reverie; and then
+hardly knowing what she was doing, she went home, and returned to her
+room.  Every interest which she had in life had been allowed to die
+under the shadow of this one.  Every thought had taken one
+direction--everything had been bitter or sweet by reference to one
+object alone; and this gone, there followed utter collapse.  She had no
+friends, and probably if she had known any they would have been of
+little use to her, for hers was a nature requiring comfort of a
+stronger kind than that which most friends can supply.  It was
+unfortunate, and yet she was spared that aggravation of torture which
+is inflicted by people who offer vague commonplaces, or what they call
+"hopes;" she was spared also that savage disappointment to which many
+are doomed who in their trouble find that all philosophy fails them,
+and the books on their shelves look so impotent, so beside the mark,
+that they narrowly escape being pitched into the fire.
+
+Andrew began to recover slowly, but he could do no work, and Miriam had
+to think about some employment for herself in order to prevent deeper
+immersion in debt.  It was very difficult to find anything for a girl
+who had been brought up to no trade; but at last, through the kindness
+of her landlady, she obtained second-hand an introduction to the
+manager of an immense drapery firm which did a large business through
+circulars sent all over the country.  Miriam was employed in addressing
+the circulars.  It was work which she could do at home, and by writing
+incessantly for about seven hours a day she could earn twelve shillings
+a week.  The occupation was detestable, and it was with the greatest
+difficulty that she could persevere with it; but after some time it
+ceased to be quite so repulsive.
+
+Her relief, however, was the relief of stupefaction and not of
+reconciliation.  Sorrow took the form of revolt.  It had always been so
+with her whenever anything was the matter with her: it was the sense of
+wrong which made it so intolerable.  What had she done, she said to
+herself a hundred times a day, that she should have been betrayed into
+wretched poverty, that she should have been deserted, and that her
+fortunes should have been linked with those of an imbecile brother.
+
+Andrew was still very weak--he could hardly speak; and as he lay there
+impassive, Miriam's hatred of his silent white face increased.  She had
+too much self-control to express herself; but at times she was almost
+on the point of breaking out, of storming at him, and asking him
+whether he had no pity for her.  One night, as she sat brooding at the
+window, and her trouble seemed almost too much for her, and she thought
+she must give way under it, a barrel organ stopped and began playing a
+melody from an opera by Verdi.  The lovely air wound its way into
+Miriam's heart; but it did not console her.  It only increased her
+self-sympathy.  She listened till she could listen no longer, and
+putting her hands over her ears she rested her head upon the table, and
+was overcome with unconquerable emotion.  Poor Andrew stared at her,
+utterly incapable of comprehending the scene.  When she had recovered,
+he quietly asked her what was the matter.
+
+"Matter!" she cried.  "I don't believe you understand or care any more
+than the bedstead on which you lie," and she rose and flung herself out
+of the house.  In those days there was, perhaps there is now, a
+path--it could not be called a road--from the southern end of London
+Bridge to Bankside.  It went past St. Saviour's Church, and then
+trending towards the river, dived, scarcely four feet wide, underneath
+some mill or mill offices, skirting a little dock which, ran up between
+the mill walls.  Barges sometimes lay moored in this dock, and
+discharged into the warehouses which towered above it.  The path then
+emerged into a dark trench between lofty buildings connected overhead
+with bridges, and finally appeared in Bankside amidst heaps of old iron
+and broken glass, the two principal articles of merchandise in those
+parts.  A dismal, most depressing region, one on which the sun never
+shone, gloomy on the brightest day.  It was impossible to enter it
+without feeling an instantaneous check to all lightness of heart.  The
+spirits were smitten as if with paralysis directly St. Saviour's was
+passed.  Thither went Miriam aimlessly that night; and when she reached
+the dock, the temptation presented itself to her with fearful force to
+throw herself in it and be at rest.  Usually in our troubles there is a
+prospect of an untried resource which may afford relief, or a glimmer
+of a distance which we may possibly reach, and where we may find peace,
+but for Miriam there was no distance, no reserve: this was her first
+acquaintance with an experience not rare, alas! but below it humanity
+cannot go, when all life ebbs from us, when we stretch out our arms in
+vain, when there is no God--nothing but a brazen Moloch, worse than the
+Satan of theology ten thousand times, because it is dead.  A Satan we
+might conquer, or at least we should feel the delight of combat in
+resisting him; but what can we do against this leaden "order of things"
+which makes our nerves ministers of madness?  Miriam did not know that
+her misery was partly a London misery, due to the change from fresh air
+and wholesome living to foul air and unnatural living.  If she had
+known it, it would not have helped her.  She could not have believed
+it, for it is the peculiarity of certain physical disorders that their
+physical character does not appear, and that they disguise themselves
+under purely mental shapes.  Montgomery, her brother, the desperate
+outlook in the future, it is true, were real; but her lack of health
+was the lens which magnified her suffering into hideous dimensions.
+The desire to get rid of it by one sudden plunge was strong upon her,
+and the friendly hand which at the nick of time intervenes in romances
+did not rescue her.  Nevertheless, she held back and passed on.
+Afterwards the thought that she had been close to suicide was for
+months a new terror.  She was unaware that the distance between us and
+dreadful crimes is much greater often than it appears to be.  The man
+who looks on a woman with adulterous desire has already committed
+adultery in his heart if he be restrained only by force or fear of
+detection; but if the restraint, although he may not be conscious of
+it, is self-imposed, he is not guilty.  Nay, even the dread of
+consequences is a motive of sufficient respectability to make a large
+difference between the sinfulness of mere lust and that of its
+fulfilment.  No friendly hand, we say, interrupted her purpose, but she
+went on her way.  Hardly had she reached the open quay, when there came
+a peal of thunder.  In London the gradual approach of a thunderstorm
+working up from a long distance is not perceived, and the suddenness of
+the roar for a moment startled her.  But from her childhood she had
+always shown a strange liking to watch a thunderstorm, and, if
+possible, to be in it.  It was her habit, when others were alarmed and
+covered their eyes, to go close to the window in order to see the
+lightning, and once she had been caught actually outside the door
+peering round the corner, because the strength of the tempest lay in
+that direction.  The rain in an instant came down in torrents, the
+flashes were incessant, and flamed round the golden cross of St. Paul's
+nearly opposite to her.  She took off her bonnet and prayed that she
+might be struck, and so released with no sin and no pain.  She was not
+heard; a bolt descended within a few feet of her, blinding her, but it
+fell upon a crane, passed harmlessly down the chain into a lot of rusty
+old scrap, and so spent itself.  She remained standing there alone and
+unnoticed, for the street was swept clear as if by grapeshot of the
+very few persons who might otherwise have been in it at that hour.
+Gradually the tumult ceased, and was succeeded by a steady, dull
+downpour; Miriam then put on her bonnet and walked home.
+
+The next day she was ill, unaccountably feverish and in great pain.
+Hers was one of those natures--happy natures, it may perhaps be
+said--which hasten always to a crisis.  She had nothing of that
+miserable temperament which is never either better or worse, and
+remains clouded with slow disease for months or years.  She managed to
+do her work, but on the following morning she was delirious.  She
+remembered nothing more till one afternoon when she seemed to wake.
+She looked up, and whose face was that which bent over her?  It was
+Miss Tippit's.  Miss Tippit had learned through the doctor what was the
+state of affairs, and had managed, notwithstanding the demand which the
+lodgings made upon her, to take her share in watching over the
+sufferer.  Her stepmother had been summoned from Cowfold, and these
+two, with the landlady, had tended her and had brought her back to
+life.  In an instant the scene in Miss Tippit's room when she was sick
+passed through Miriam's brain, and she sobbed piteously, lifted up her
+arms as if to clasp her heroic benefactor, but the thought was too
+great for her, and she fainted.  Nevertheless she was recovering, and
+when she came to herself again, Miss Tippit was ready with the
+intervention of some trifle to distract her attention.  As her strength
+returned she was able to talk a little, and her first question was--
+
+"Miss Tippit, why did you come here?  Oh, if you but knew!  What claim
+have I on you?"
+
+"Hush, my dear; those days are past.  You did not love me then perhaps;
+but what of that?  I am sure, you will not mind my saying it: 'If ye
+love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the
+publicans the same?'  But I know you did love me really."
+
+"Where is Andrew?"
+
+"Quite well, at home in Cowfold."
+
+That was as much as Miriam could stand then.  For weeks to come she was
+well-nigh drained of all vitality, and it flowed into her gradually and
+with many relapses.  The doctor thought she ought to be moved into the
+country.  Mrs. Tacchi had some friends in one of the villages lying by
+the side of the Avon in Wiltshire, just where that part of Salisbury
+Plain on which stands Stonehenge slopes down to the river.  Miriam knew
+nothing of the history of the Amesbury valley, but she was sensible--as
+who must not be?--to its exquisite beauty and the delicacy of the
+contrasts between the downs and the richly-foliaged fields through
+which the Avon winds.  It is a chalk river, clear as a chalk river
+always is if unpolluted; the downs are chalk, and though they are
+wide-sweeping and treeless, save for clusters of beech here and there
+on the heights, the dale with its water, meadows, cattle, and dense
+woods, so different from the uplands above them, is in peculiar and
+lovely harmony with them.
+
+One day she contrived to reach Stonehenge.  She was driven there by the
+farmer with whom she was staying, and she asked to be left there while
+he went forward.  He was to fetch her when he returned.  It was a clear
+but grey day, and she sat outside the outer circle on the turf looking
+northwards over the almost illimitable expanse.   She had been told as
+much as is known about that mysterious monument,--that it had been
+built ages before any record, and that not only were the names of the
+builders forgotten, but their purpose in building it was forgotten too.
+She was oppressed with a sense of her own, nothingness and the
+nothingness of man.  If those who raised that temple had so utterly
+passed away, for how long would the memory of her existence last?
+Stonehenge itself too would pass.  The wind and the rain had already
+worn perhaps half of it; and the place that now knows it will know it
+no more save by vague tradition, which also will be extinguished.
+
+Suddenly, and without any apparent connection with what had  gone
+before, and indeed in contrast with it, it came into Miriam's mind that
+she must do something for her fellow-creatures.  How came it there?
+Who can tell?  Anyhow, there was this idea in the soul of Miriam Tacchi
+that morning.
+
+The next question was, What could she do?  There was one thing she
+could do, and she could not go astray in doing it.  Whatever may be
+wrong or mistaken, it cannot be wrong or a mistake to wait upon the
+sick and ease their misery.  She knew, however, that she could not take
+up the task without training, and she belonged to no church or
+association which could assist her.  Perhaps one of the best
+recommendations of the Catholic Church was that it held out a hand to
+men who, having for some reason or other, learned to hold their lives
+lightly, were candidates for the service of humanity--men for whom
+death had no terrors--by whom it was even courted, and who were willing
+therefore to wait upon the plague-smitten, or to carry the Cross
+amongst wild and savage tribes.  Those who are skilled in quibbling may
+say that neither in the case of the Catholic missionary nor in that of
+the Sister of Mercy is there any particular merit.  What they do is
+done not from any pure desire for man's welfare, but because there is
+no healthy passion for enjoyment.  Nothing is idler than disputes about
+the motives to virtuous deeds, or the proportion of praise to be
+assigned to the doers of them.  It is a common criticism that a sweet
+temper deserves no commendation, because the blessed possessor of it is
+naturally sweet-tempered, and undergoes no terrible struggle in order
+to say the sweet word which he who is cursed with spite only just
+manages to force himself to utter.  What we are bound to praise or
+blame, however, is the result, and the result only--just as we praise
+or blame perfect or imperfect flowers.  If it comes to a remorseless
+probing of motives, there are none of us who can escape a charge of
+selfishness; and, in fact, a perfectly _abstract_ disinterestedness is
+a mere logical and impossible figment.
+
+To revert to what was said a moment ago, it may be urged that no
+sufficient cause is shown for Miriam's determination.  What had she
+undergone?  A little poverty, a little love affair, a little sickness.
+But what brought Paul to the disciples at Damascus?  A light in the sky
+and a vision.  What intensity of light, what brilliancy of vision,
+would be sufficient to change the belief and the character of a modern
+man of the world or a professional politician?  Paul had that in him
+which could be altered by the pathetic words of the Crucified One, "I
+am He whom thou persecutest."  The man of the world or the politician
+would evade an appeal from the heaven of heavens, backed by the glory
+of seraphim and archangel.  Miriam had a vitality, a susceptibility or
+fluidity of character--call it what you will--which did not need great
+provocation.  There are some mortals on this earth to whom nothing more
+than a certain, summer morning very early, or a certain chance idea in
+a lane ages ago, or a certain glance from a fellow-creature dead for
+years, has been the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, or
+the Descent of the Holy Ghost.
+
+A man now old and nearing his end is known to Miriam's biographer, who
+one Sunday November afternoon, when he was but twenty years old, met a
+woman in a London street and looked in her face.  Neither he nor she
+stopped for an instant; he looked in her face, passed on, and never saw
+her again.  He married, had children, who now have children, but that
+woman's face has never left him, and the colours of the portrait which
+hangs in his soul's oratory are as vivid as ever.  A thousand times has
+he appealed to it; a thousand times has it sat in judgment; and a
+thousand times has its sacred beauty redeemed him.
+
+Miriam wrote to Miss Tippit expressing her newly-formed wish.  Miss
+Tippit, with some doubts as to her friend's fitness for the duty,
+promised to do what she could; and at last, after complete recovery,
+Miriam was allowed to begin a kind of apprenticeship to the art of
+nursing in a small hospital, recommended by Miss Tippit's friend, the
+doctor.  One morning, a bright day in June, she was taken there.  When
+the door opened, there was disclosed a long white room with beds on
+either side, and a broad passage down the middle.  The walls were
+relieved by a few illuminated sentences, scriptural and secular; women
+dressed in a blue uniform were moving about noiselessly, and one of the
+physicians on the staff, with some students or assistants, was standing
+beside a patient happily unconscious, and demonstrating that he could
+not live.  Round one of the beds a screen was drawn; Miriam did not
+quite know what it meant, but she guessed and shuddered.  She passed on
+to a little room at the end, and here she was introduced to her new
+mistress, the lady-superintendent.  She was a small, well-formed woman
+of about thirty, with a pale thin face, lightish brown hair, grey eyes,
+and thinnish lips.  She also was dressed in uniform, but with a
+precision and grace which showed that though the material might be the
+same as that used by her underlings, it was made up at the West End.
+She was evidently born to command, as little women often are.  It was
+impossible to be five minutes in her company without being affected by
+her domination.  Her very clothes felt it, for not a rebellious wrinkle
+or crease dared to show itself.  The nurses came to her almost every
+moment for directions, which were given with brevity and clearness, and
+obeyed with the utmost deference.  The furniture was like that of a
+yacht, very compact, scrupulously clean, and very handy.  There was a
+complete apparatus for instantaneously making tea, a luxurious little
+armchair specially made for its owner, a minute writing-case, and, for
+decorations, there were dainty and delicate water-colours.
+Half-a-dozen books lay about, a novel or two of the best kind, and two
+or three volumes of poems.
+
+"You wish to become a nurse?" said Miss Dashwood.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I am afraid you hardly know what it is, and that when you do know you
+will find it very disagreeable.  So many young women come here with
+entirely false notions as to their duties."
+
+Miriam was silent; Miss Dashwood's manner depressed her.
+
+"However, you can try.  You will have to begin at the very bottom.  I
+always insist on this with my probationers.  It teaches them how the
+work ought to be done, and, in addition, proper habits of
+subordination.  For three months you will have to scrub the floors and
+assist in keeping the wards in order."
+
+Miriam had imagined that she would at once be asked to watch over
+grateful patients, to give them medicine, and read to them.  However,
+she was determined to go through with her project, and she assented.
+The next morning saw her in coarse clothes, busy with a pail and soap
+and water.  It was very hard.  She was not a Catholic novice; she was
+not penetrated with the great religious idea that, done in the service
+of the Master, all work is alike in dignity; she had, in fact, no
+religion whatever, and she was confronted with a trial severe even to
+an enthusiast received into a nunnery with all the pomp of a gorgeous
+ritual and sustained by the faith of ages.
+
+Specially troublesome was her new employment to Miriam, because she was
+by nature so unmethodical and careless.  Perhaps there are no habits so
+hard to overcome as those of general looseness and want of system.
+They are often associated with abundance of energy.  The corners are
+not shirked through fatigue, but there is an unaccountable persistency
+in avoiding them, which resolution and preaching are alike unable to
+conquer.  The root of the inconsistency is a desire speedily to achieve
+results.  To keep this desire in subjection, to shut the eyes to
+results, but patiently to remove the dust to the last atom of it lying
+in the dark angle, is a good part of self-culture.
+
+In a hospital Miriam's defect was one of the deadly sins, and many were
+the admonitions which she received from Miss Dashwood.  One evening,
+after a day in which they had been more frequent than usual, she went
+to bed, but lay awake.  She was obliged to confess to herself that the
+light of three months ago, which had then shone round her great design,
+had faded.  To conceive such a design is one thing, to go down on the
+knees and scour floors week after week is something different.
+
+She did not intend, however, to give up.  When she rose in the morning
+she looked out over the London tiles and through the smoke with a
+miserable sinking of heart, hoping, if she hoped for anything, for the
+end of the day, and still more for the end of life; but still she
+persevered, and determined to persevere.
+
+One day a new case came into the ward.  It was evidently serious.  A
+man returning home late at night, drunk or nearly so, had fallen under
+a cart in crossing a road and had been terribly crushed.  He had
+received some injury to the head and was unconscious.  Miriam, to whom
+such events were now tolerably familiar, took no particular notice
+until her work brought her near the bed, and then she saw to her
+amazement and horror that the poor wretch was Montgomery.  Instantly
+all that had slumbered in her, as fire slumbers in grey ashes, broke
+out into flame.  She continually crept as well as she could towards
+him, and listened for any remark which might be dropped by nurse or
+doctor upon his condition.  Three days afterwards he died, without
+having once regained his reason save just one hour before death.  He
+then opened his eyes--they fell upon Miriam; he knew her, and with a
+faint kind of astonishment muttered her name.  Before she could come
+close to him he had gone.
+
+Another month passed, and as Miriam's constitutional failings showed no
+sign of mitigation, Miss Dashwood found herself obliged to take serious
+notice of them.  The experienced, professional superintendent knew
+perfectly well that the smart, neat, methodical girl, with no motive in
+her but the desire of succeeding and earning a good living, was worth a
+dozen who were self-sacrificing but not soldierly.  One morning, after
+Miss Dashwood's patience had been more than usually tried, she sent for
+Miriam, and kindly but firmly told her that she was unsuitable for a
+hospital and must prepare to leave.  She was not taken by surprise; she
+had said the same thing to herself a dozen times before; but when it
+was made certain to her by another person, it sounded differently.
+
+She sought her friend Miss Tippit.  To Miss Tippit the experience was
+not new.  She had herself in her humble way imagined schemes of
+usefulness, which were broken through personal unfitness; she knew how
+at last the man who thinks he will conquer a continent has to be
+content with the conquest of his own kitchen-garden, fifty feet by
+twenty.  She knew this in her own humble way, although her ambition, so
+far from being continental, had never extended even to a parish.  She,
+however, could do Miriam no good.  She had learned how to vanquish her
+own trouble, but she was powerless against the very same trouble in
+another person.  She had the sense, too, for she was no bigot, to see
+her helplessness, and she gave Miriam the best of all advice--to go
+home to Cowfold.  Alpine air, Italian cities, would perhaps have been
+better, bat as these were impossible, Cowfold was the next best.
+Perhaps the worst effect of great cities, at any rate of English
+cities, is not the poverty they create and the misery which it brings,
+but the mental mischief which is wrought, often unconsciously, by their
+dreariness and darkness.  In Pimlico or Bethnal Green a man might have
+a fortune given him, and it would not stir him to so much gratitude as
+an orange if he were living on the South Downs, and the peculiar
+sourness of modern democracy is due perhaps to deficiency of oxygen and
+sunlight.  Miriam had no objection to return.  She was beaten and
+indifferent; her father and mother wrote to welcome her, and she
+recollected her mother's devotion to her when she was ill.  She had not
+the heart to travel by the road on which she and Andrew came to London,
+and she chose a longer route by which she was brought to a point about
+ten miles from Cowfold.  She found affection and peace, and Andrew, who
+had lost his taste for whisky, was quietly at work in his father's shop
+at his old trade.  There was at the same time no vacant space for her
+in the household.  There was nothing particular for her to do, and
+after a while, when the novelty of return had worn off, she grew weary,
+and longed unconsciously for something on which fully to exercise her
+useless strength.
+
+In Cowfold at that time dwelt a basketmaker named Didymus Farrow.  Why
+he was called Didymus is a very simple story.
+
+His mother had once heard a sermon preached by a bishop from the text,
+"Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow-disciples,
+Let us also go, that we may die with Him."  The preacher enlarged on
+the blessed privilege offered by our Lord, and observed how happy he
+should have been--how happy all his dear brethren in Christ would have
+been, if the same privilege had been extended to them.  But, alas! God
+had not so decreed.  When the day arrived on which they would see their
+Master in glory, they could then assure Him, and He would believe them,
+how willingly they would have borne His cross--aye, and even have hung
+with Him on the fatal tree.
+
+Some weeks before Didymus Farrow was born, Mrs. Farrow remembered the
+bishop and part of his discourse, but what she remembered most
+distinctly was, "Thomas, which is called Didymus."  These words were
+borne in upon her, she said, and accordingly the son was baptized
+Didymus.  When he grew up, he entered upon his father's trade, which
+was that of making the willow hampers for fruit-growers, of whom there
+were a good many round Cowfold, and who sent their fruit to London,
+stacked high on huge broad-wheeled waggons.  Didymus also manufactured
+hand-baskets, all kinds of willow ware and white wood goods.  He had a
+peculiar aptitude for the lathe, and some of his bread-plates were
+really as neatly executed as any that could be seen in London.  He had
+even turned in poplar some vases, which found their way to a
+drawing-master, and were used as models.  He was now about thirty, had
+yellow hair, blue eyes, a smiling face, widish mouth, always a little
+open, nose a little turned up, whistled a good deal, and walked with a
+peculiar dance-like lilt.  He was a gay, innocent creature, honest in
+all his dealings, and fairly prosperous.  He had been married early,
+but had lost his wife when he was about twenty-six, and had been left
+with one daughter, whom his sister had in charge.  The sister was about
+to be married, and when her brother knew that the day for her departure
+was fixed, it came into his head that he ought to be married again.
+Otherwise, who could manage his house and his family?
+
+He was not a man to seek any recondite reasons for doing or not doing
+anything.  He was not in the habit of pausing before he acted, and
+demanding the production of every conceivable argument, yea or nay, and
+then with toil adjusting the balance between them.  If a lot of withies
+looked cheap, he bought them straightway, and did not defer the bargain
+for weeks till he could ascertain if he could get them cheaper
+elsewhere.
+
+Going home one evening, he passed his friend Giacomo's shop, and
+through the window saw Miriam talking to her father.  Instantly it
+struck him that Miriam was the girl for him, and he began to whistle
+the air to "Hark the Lark," for he was a member of the Cowfold Glee
+Club, and sang alto.  This was on the 25th May.  Miriam being
+accustomed to walk in the fields in the evening, and Mr. D. Farrow
+being fully aware of her custom, he met her on the 26th and after some
+preliminary skirmishing requested her to take him for better or for
+worse.  She was surprised, but did not say so, and asked time for
+consideration.  She did consider, but consideration availed nothing.
+It is so seldom even at the most important moments that our faculties
+are permitted fully to help us.  There is no free space allowed, and we
+are dragged hither and thither by a swarm of temporary impulses.  The
+result has to stand, fixed for ever, but the operative forces which
+determine it are those of the moment, and not of eternity.  Miriam,
+moreover, just then lacked the strong instinct which mercifully for us
+so often takes us in hand.  She was not altogether unhappy, but dull
+and careless as to what became of her.  No oracle advised her.  There
+is now no pillar of cloud or of fire to guide mortals; the heavenly
+apparition does not appear even in extremities; and consequently a week
+afterwards she said yes, and six months afterwards she was Mrs. Farrow.
+
+For some time the day went pleasantly enough.  She had plenty to do as
+mistress of the house, and in entertaining the new friends who came to
+see her.  After a while, when the novelty had worn off, the old
+insuperable feeling of monotony returned, more particularly in the
+evening.  Mr. Farrow never went near a public-house, but he never
+opened a book, and during the winter, when the garden was closed,
+amused himself with an accordion, or in practising his part in a catch,
+or in cutting with a penknife curious little wooden chairs and tables.
+This mode of passing the time was entertaining enough to him, but not
+so to Miriam, who was fatally deficient, as so many of her countrymen
+and countrywomen are, in that lightness which distinguishes the French
+or the Italians, and would have enabled her, had she been so
+fortunately endowed with it, to sit by the fire and prattle innocently
+to her husband, whatever he might be doing.  When she came to her new
+abode and was turning out the corners, she discovered upstairs in a
+cupboard a number of brown-looking old books, which had not been
+touched for many a long day.  Amongst them were Rollin's Ancient
+History, some of Swift's Works with pages torn out, doubtless those
+which some impatiently clean creature had justly considered too filthy
+for perusal.  There were also Paul and Virginia, Dryden's Virgil,
+Robinson Crusoe, and above all a Shakespeare.  Miriam had never been
+much of a reader; but now, having nothing better to do, she looked into
+these books, and generally brought one downstairs in the afternoon.
+Swift she did not quite understand, and he frightened her; she never,
+in fact, got through anything but Gulliver and the Tale of a Tub; but
+some of his sayings stuck to her and came up against her again and
+again, until, like most of us who have had even a glimpse of the dark
+and dreadful caverns in that man's soul, she wished that he had never
+been born.  For years, even to the day of her death, the poison of one
+sentence in the Tale of a Tub remained with her--those memorable words
+that "happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived."  Yet
+she pitied him; who does not pity him?  Who is there in English history
+who excites and deserves profounder pity?
+
+Of all her treasures, however, the one which produced the deepest
+impression on her was "Romeo and Juliet."  She saw there the
+possibilities of love.  For the first time she became fully aware of
+what she could have been.  One evening she sat as in a trance.  Cowfold
+had departed; she was on the balcony in Verona, Romeo was below.  She
+leaned over and whispered to him--
+
+  "My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
+  My love as deep: the more I give to thee,
+  The more I have, for both are infinite."
+
+She went on; the day was breaking; she heard the parting--
+
+  "Farewell! farewell! one kiss and I'll descend,"
+
+Her arms were round his neck with an ecstasy of passion; he was going;
+the morning star was flashing before the sun, and she cried after him--
+
+  "Art thou gone so? love, lord, ay husband, friend!
+  I must hear from thee every day in the hour,
+  For in a minute there are many days."
+
+Ah, God! what is the count of all the men and women whom, since it was
+first "plaid publiquely with great applause," this tragedy has reminded
+of the _what might have been_!
+
+Mr. Didymus Farrow, during his wife's absence in Verona, had been very
+much engaged in whittling a monkey which toppled over on a long pole,
+but being dissatisfied with its performance he had taken his accordion
+out of the box, and, just as Lady Capulet called, he struck up "Down
+amongst the dead men," which, whatever its merit may be, is not
+particularly well adapted to that instrument.  Verona and Romeo were
+straightway replaced by Cowfold and the Cowfold consort.  He was in the
+best of spirits, and he stooped down just as his wife was waking, took
+the cat--which was lying before the fire--and threw it on her lap.
+
+"Oh, please do not!" she exclaimed, a little angry, shocked, and sad.
+
+"I wish you would not sit and addle your brains over those books.
+Blessed if I don't burn them all!  What good do they do?  Why don't you
+talk?"
+
+"I've nothing particular to say."
+
+"You never have anything to say when you've been reading.  Now if I
+read a bit of the newspaper, I've always something to talk about."
+
+She was silent, and her husband continued his tune.
+
+"Miriam, my dear, you aren't well.  Are you in pain?"
+
+Mr. Farrow never understood any suffering unless it was an ache of some
+bind.
+
+"Let me get you just a drop of brandy with some ginger in it."
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+"Yes, you will have just a drop," and he jumped up at once and went to
+the cupboard.
+
+"I tell you I will not."
+
+The "not" came out with such emphasis that he desisted and sat down.
+The monkey lay on the table, the accordion lay there too; Mr. Farrow
+stopped his whistling and sat back in his chair with his finger to his
+mouth.  At last, he took up the book, turned it over, and put it down
+again.  He loved his wife after his fashion, and could not bear to see
+anybody distressed.   He placed his chair beside hers, and lifting her
+arm, put it round his neck, she nothing resisting.
+
+"Tell me now, there's a dear, what's the matter," and he kissed her.
+
+"Nothing," she said, somewhat softened by his caresses.
+
+"That's right, my twopenny," a name he used confidentially to her.  "A
+little faint; the room is rather close," and he opened the window a
+trifle at the top, returning to his seat, and embracing her again.
+
+Yet, though she yielded, it was not Mr. Farrow who held her in his
+arms; she purposely strove to think an imaginary Romeo's head was on
+her neck--his face was something like the face of Montgomery--and she
+kept up the illusion all that night.  When she came down to breakfast
+and sat opposite her husband, it struck her suddenly that she had
+cheated him and was a sinner.
+
+In the afternoon she went out for a stroll through the streets, and up
+to the monument in the park.  Cowfold was busy, for it was market-day.
+Sheep-pens were in the square full of sheep, and men were purchasing
+them and picking them out as they were sold; dogs were barking; the
+wandering dealer who pitched his earthenware van at the corner was
+ringing his plates together to prove them indestructible; old Madge
+Campion, who sold gooseberry-tarts and hot mutton-pies on her board
+under an awning supported by clothes-props, was surrounded by a shoal
+of children, as happy as the sunshine; the man with the panorama was
+exhibiting, at one halfpenny a head, the murder of Lord William Russell
+to a string of boys and girls who mounted the stool in turn to look
+through the glasses; and the cheapjack was expatiating on the merits of
+cutlery, pictures, fire-irons, and proving that his brass candlestick,
+honestly-worth-ten-shillings-but-obtainable-at-one-and-four-pence-
+because-he-really-could-not-cart-it-about-any-longer answered the
+double purpose of a candlestick and burglar-alarm by reason of the
+tremendous click of the spring, which anybody might--if they
+liked--mistake for a pistol.
+
+Through all the crowd Miriam walked unsympathetic.  She cursed the
+constitution with which she was born.  She wished she had been endowed
+with that same blessed thoughtlessness, and that she could be taken out
+of herself with an interest in pigs, pie-dishes, and Cowfold affairs
+generally.  She went on up to her favourite resting-place; everything
+was so still, and her eye wandered over the illimitable distance but
+without pleasure.  She recollected that she had an engagement; that two
+cousins of her husband were coming to tea, and she slowly returned.  At
+half-past five they appeared.  They chattered away merrily with Mr.
+Farrow, who was as lively as they were, until by degrees Miriam's
+silence began to operate, and they grew dull.  Tea being over, she
+managed to escape, and as she went upstairs she heard the laughter
+recommence, for it was she who had suppressed it.  Lying down in her
+room overhead, the noise continued, and it came into her mind that
+wherever she went she cast a cold shadow.  "They must wish me dead,"
+she thought.
+
+She had been married so short a time; to what a dreary length the
+future stretched before her, and she did not love the man she had
+chosen, as she understood love.  How was life to be lived?  She did not
+reproach herself.  If she could have done that, if she could have
+accused herself of deliberate self-betrayal, it would have been better;
+but she seemed to have been blindfolded, and led by some unknown force
+into the position in which she found herself.
+
+For some days she went on with her books, but the more she read the
+more miserable she became, because there was nobody with whom she could
+interchange what she thought about them.  She was alarmed at last to
+find that something very much like hatred to her husband was beginning
+to develop itself.  She was alarmed because she was too much of an
+Englishwoman to cherish the thought of any desperate remedy, such as
+separation; and yet the prospect of increasing aversion, which appeared
+to grow she knew not how, terrified her.  One Monday afternoon she had
+gone out to her usual haunt in the park, and near the monument she saw
+somebody whom she presently recognised to be Mr. Armstrong, the vicar
+of Marston-Cocking, a village about four miles from Cowfold.  She knew
+him because he had dealt with her husband, and she had met him in the
+shop.  Marston-Cocking was really nothing better than a hamlet, with a
+little grey squat church with a little square tower.  Adjoining the
+churchyard was Mr. Armstrong's house.  It was not by any means a model
+parsonage.  It was a very plain affair of red brick with a door in the
+middle, a window with outside shutters on either side, and one story
+above.  There was a small garden in front, protected from the road by
+white palings and a row of laurels.  At the back was a bigger garden,
+and behind that an orchard.  It had one recommendation, worth to its
+tenant all the beauty of a moss-covered manse in Devonshire, and that
+was its openness.  It was on a little sandy hill.  For some
+unaccountable reason there was a patch of sand in that part of the
+country, delicious, bright, cheerful yellow and brown sand, lifting
+itself into little cliffs here and there, pierced with the holes of the
+sand-martin.  It exhaled no fogs, and was never dull even on a November
+day, when the clay-lands five miles away breathed a vapour which lay
+blue and heavy on the furrows, and the miry paths, retaining in their
+sullenness for weeks the impress of every footmark, almost pulled the
+boots off the feet as you walked along them.  At Marston, on the
+contrary, the rain disappeared in an hour; and the landscape always
+seemed in the depths of winter to retain something of summer sunshine.
+The vicarage was open, open to every wind, and from the top rooms the
+stars could be seen to rise and set, no trees intercepting the view.
+Mr. Armstrong was a man of sixty, a widower with no children.  His
+income from his living was about two hundred pounds annually, and the
+number of his parishioners all told, men, women, and children, was, as
+nearly as may be, two hundred.  He had been at Marston-Cocking for
+thirty-five years.  He came just after his wife died--how he hardly
+knew.  The living was offered him; he thought the change would do him
+good, although he did not intend to remain; but there he had stayed,
+and there was no chance of his removal.  He was completely out of the
+world, troubled himself with no church controversies, and preached
+little short sermons telling his congregation not to tell lies nor be
+unkind to one another.  Every now and then he introduced into his
+discourses his one favourite subject, astronomy, and by degrees the
+labourers in Marston-Cocking knew more about the sky and its daily and
+nightly changes than many a highly educated person in the city.  Mr.
+Armstrong, otherwise a very plain, simple creature, always grew
+eloquent on the common ignorance of the heavens.  "Here," he would say,
+"has God thrust upon us these marvellous sights.  These are not the
+secrets hidden in the mine--they are forced upon us; and yet we walk
+with our heads to the earth; we do not know the morning star when we
+see it, nor can we even recognise the Pleiads and Arcturus which Job
+knew."  Mr. Armstrong had made all his instruments with his own hands,
+and had even used the top of the church-tower as an observatory.  Mrs.
+Bullen, the wife of the one farmer in the parish, a lady who wrote the
+finest of Italian pointed hands, who had been in a Brighton
+boarding-school for ten years, and had been through "Keith on the Use
+of the Globes," was much scandalised at this "appropriation of the
+sacred edifice to secular purposes," as she called it, but she met with
+no encouragement.  The poor people somehow connected heaven with the
+stars, and Mr. Armstrong never undeceived them, so that they saw
+nothing improper in the big telescope under the weathercock.
+
+"Really, James," said Mrs. Bullen one morning to Mr. Armstrong's
+gardener and general man-of-all-work as he was carrying a chair from
+the house into the tower, "do you think this is quite right?  Do you
+think our Saviour would have sanctioned the erection of a profane
+instrument over the house of prayer?"
+
+James was very thick-headed, and hardly knew the meaning of these long
+words, bat he did not like Mrs. Bullen, and he resented her talking to
+him, a servant, in that strain about his master.
+
+"Ah!  Mrs. Bullen, you needn't bother yourself.  He's all right with
+the Saviour,--more so nor many other people, maybe."
+
+"Well, but, James, this is a church consecrated to the service of God."
+
+"Ah! how do you know?  Very likely o' nights--for he's up there when
+you're abed and asleep--he's a looking into heaven through that there
+glass, and, sees God and the blessed angels."
+
+"Really, James, can you be so ignorant as not to know that God is a
+Spirit?  I am astonished at you."  And Mrs. Bullen passed on without a
+single doubt in her mind that there was a single weak spot in her
+creed, or that anybody could question its intelligibility and coherence
+who would not also question the multiplication-table.  She told her
+husband when she got home that it was really dreadful to think that the
+poor had such low views of the Divine Being.  How degraded!  No wonder
+they were so immoral.  Bullen, however, did not trouble himself much
+about these matters.  He assented to what his wife said, but then he
+called "spirit" "sperrit," to her annoyance, and she could not get him
+to comprehend what she meant by "entirely immaterial," although it was
+so plain.
+
+Mr. Armstrong, as we have said, was in front of Miriam.  He had brought
+a small telescope to that point to be tested, for exactly eight miles
+away was a church-tower with a clock, and he wished to see if he could
+tell the time by it.  Miriam was about to avoid him, but he recognised
+her and beckoned to her.
+
+"Ah! Mrs. Farrow, is it you?  Would yon like to look through my glass?"
+
+He adjusted it for her, and she saw the hour quite plainly.
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed, "that is wonderful!"
+
+"Yes, it is pretty well.  We will now put him in his box.  For the box
+I have to thank Mr. Farrow.  He is one of the neatest hands at that
+kind of work I know, although it is not exactly his trade.  I never was
+much of a joiner."
+
+Miriam was a little surprised.  She knew that her husband was clever
+with his tools, but she had never set any value on his labours.  Now,
+however, she was really struck with the well-polished mahogany and the
+piece of brass neatly let into the lid, and when she heard Mr.
+Armstrong's praises she began to think a little differently.
+
+"Ah!" he continued, "it is so difficult now to get anybody to take any
+interest in such a job as that.  I have got another box at home made by
+a professed cabinetmaker, and it is really disgraceful.  It will never
+be right, although I have had it altered two or three times.  When it
+was shut it caught the object-glass inside.  I remedied that defect,
+but only to create a worse, for then the instrument shook about.  So it
+is, when once a thing is badly done, you had better get rid of it; it
+is of no use to bother with it.  You may depend upon it, it is not bad
+just here or there, but is bad all through, and the attempt to mend it
+serves no other purpose than to bring to light hidden weakness.  On the
+other hand, if you are fortunate enough to have work done like Mr.
+Farrow's, it is perfect all through.  You can never surprise it, so to
+speak.  Just look at it.  Look at that green baize rest.  There is not
+the thirty-second part of an inch to spare on either side, and the lid
+comes down so evenly that you can hardly see where the edge is.  Shake
+the box, and you will not feel a single movement.  You have never seen
+my big telescope at Marston?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, if you like, you can come over with your husband any bright
+night, and I shall be happy to show it to you."
+
+Miriam thanked him, and they parted.
+
+A few days afterwards Mrs. and Mr. Farrow presented themselves at the
+vicarage.  It was a lovely evening, and so clear that the outline of
+the constellations was obscured by the multitude of small stars, which
+usually are not seen, or seen but imperfectly.  In the south was
+Jupiter, mild, magnificent, like a god amongst the crowd of lesser
+divinities.
+
+Mr. Armstrong, with all the ardour of an enthusiast for his science,
+began a little preliminary lecture.
+
+"I am not going to let you peep simply in order to astonish you.  I
+abominate what are called popular lectures for that very reason.  If
+you can be made to understand the apparent revolution of the heavens,
+that is better than all speculation.  To understand is the great thing,
+not to gape.  Now I assume you know that the earth goes round on its
+axis, and that consequently the stars seem to revolve round the earth.
+But the great difficulty is to realise _how_ they go round, because the
+axis is not upright, nor yet horizontal, but inclined, and points to
+that star up there, the pole-star.  Consequently the stars describe
+circles which are not at right angles with the horizon, nor yet
+parallel to it.  That is my first lesson."
+
+Mr. Farrow comprehended without the slightest difficulty, but Miriam
+could not.  She had noticed that some of the stars appear in the east
+and disappear in the west, but beyond that she had not gone.  Mr.
+Armstrong continued--
+
+"The next thing you have to bear in mind is that the planets move about
+amongst the stars.  Just think!  They go round the sun, and so do we.
+The times of their revolution are not coincident with ours, and their
+path is sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards.  Suppose we were in
+the centre of the planetary system, all these irregularities would
+disappear; but we are outside, and therefore it looks so complicated."
+
+Again Mr. Farrow comprehended, but to Miriam it was all dark.
+
+"Now," continued Mr. Armstrong, "these are the two great truths which I
+wish you not simply to acknowledge, but to _feel_.  If you can once
+from your own observation _realise_ the way the stars revolve--why some
+near the pole never set--why some never rise, and why Venus is seen
+both before the sun and after it--you will have done yourselves more
+real good than if you were to dream for years of immeasurable
+distances, and what is beyond and beyond and beyond, and all that
+nonsense.  The great beauty of astronomy is not what is
+incomprehensible in it, but its comprehensibility--its geometrical
+exactitude.  Now you may look."
+
+Miriam looked first.  Jupiter was in the field.  She could not suppress
+a momentary exclamation of astonished ecstasy at the spectacle.  While
+she watched, Mr. Armstrong told her something about the mighty orb.  He
+pointed out the satellites, contrasted the size of Jupiter with that of
+the earth, and explained to her the distances at which parts of the
+planet are from each other as compared with those of New Zealand and
+America from London.  But what affected her most was to see Jupiter's
+solemn, still movement, and she gazed and gazed, utterly absorbed,
+until at last he had disappeared.  The stars had passed thus before her
+eyes ever since she had been born, but what was so familiar had never
+before been emphasised or put in a frame, and consequently had never
+produced its due effect.
+
+Afterwards Mr. Farrow had his turn, and Mr. Armstrong then observed
+that they had had enough; that it was getting late, but that he hoped
+they would come again.  They started homewards, but their teacher
+remained solitary till far beyond midnight at his lonely post.  The
+hamlet lay asleep beneath him in profoundest peace.  His study had a
+strange fascination for him.  He never wrote anything about it; he
+never set himself up as a professional expert; he could not preach much
+about it; most of what he acquired was incommunicable at
+Marston-Cocking, or nearly so, and yet he was never weary.  It was for
+some inexplicable reason the food and the medicine which his mind
+needed.  It kept him in health, it pacified him, and contented him with
+his lot.
+
+On the following evening Miriam and her husband sat at tea.
+
+"You didn't quite understand Mr. Armstrong, Miriam?"
+
+"No, not quite."
+
+"Ah! it is not easy; it all lies in the axis not being perpendicular,
+and in our not being in the middle.  Now look here!"
+
+He took a long string; tied one end to the curtain-rod over the window,
+and brought the other down to the floor.  He then took Miriam, placed
+her underneath it in the middle with her face to the window.
+
+"Now, that is the north, and the top of the string is the pole star.
+Just imagine the string the axis of a great globe in which the stars
+are fixed, and that it goes round from your right hand to your left."
+But to Miriam, although she had so strong an imagination, it was
+unimaginable.  It was odd that she could create Verona and Romeo with
+such intense reality, and yet that she could not perform such a simple
+feat as that of portraying to herself the revolution of an inclined
+sphere.
+
+Mr. Farrow was not disappointed.
+
+"It will be all right," he said, and the next morning he was busy in
+the shed in the bottom of the garden.  He came to his afternoon meal
+with glee, and directly it was over, took his wife away to see what he
+had been doing.  The shed had two floors, with a trap-door in the
+middle.  To the topmost corner of the upper story he had fixed a pole
+which descended obliquely through a hole in the floor.  This was the
+axis, and the floor was the horizon.  He had also, by the help of some
+stoutish wire and some of his withies, fairly improvised a few
+meridians, so that when Miriam put her head through the trap-door, she
+seemed to be in the centre of a half globe.
+
+"Now, my dear, it will all be plain.  I cannot make the thing turn, but
+you can fancy a star fixed down there in the east at the end of that
+withy, and if the withy were to go round, or if the star were to climb
+up it, it would just go so," tracing its course with his finger, "and
+set there.  Now, those stars near the pole, you see, would never set,
+and that is why we see them all night long."
+
+It all came to her in an instant.
+
+"Really, how clever you are!" she said.
+
+"Do you think so?" and there was a trace of something serious,
+something of a surprise on his countenance.
+
+"I have heard Mr. Armstrong talk about the stars before, although never
+so much as he did that night, and then I've watched them a good bit,
+and noticed the way they go.  As for the planets, they are not so easy,
+but I think I have got hold of it all."
+
+Miriam looked out of window when she went to bed, and felt a new
+pleasure.  The firmament, instead of being a mere muddle--beautiful,
+indeed, she had always thought it--had a plan in it.  She marked where
+one particularly bright star was showing itself in the south-east--it
+was Sirius; and in the night she rose softly, drew aside the blind, saw
+him again due south, and recognised the similarity of the arc with that
+which her husband had constructed with his withies and wire.  She lay
+down again, thinking, as she went off to sleep, that still that silent,
+eternal march went on.  At four she again awoke from light slumber, and
+crept to the blind again.  Another portion of the same arc had been
+traversed, and Sirius with his jewelled flashes was beginning to
+descend.  She thought she should like to see him actually sink, and she
+waited and waited till he had disappeared, till the first tint of dawn
+was discernible in the east, and that almost indistinguishable murmur
+was heard which precedes the day.  She then once more lay down, and
+when she rose, she was richer by a very simple conception, but still
+richer.  She felt as a novice might feel who had been initiated, and
+had been intrusted at least with the preliminary secrets of her
+community.  She owed her initiation to Mr. Armstrong, but also to her
+husband.  Experts no doubt may smile, and so may the young people who,
+in these days of universal knowledge, have got up astronomy for
+examinations, but nevertheless, in the profounder study of the science
+there is perhaps no pleasure so sweet and so awful as that which
+arises, not when books are read about it, but when the heavens are
+first actually watched, when the movement of the Bear is first actually
+seen for ourselves, and with the morning Arcturus is discerned
+punctually over the eastern horizon; when the advance of the stars
+westwards through the year, marking the path of the earth in its orbit,
+is noted, and the moon's path also becomes intelligible.
+
+Mr. Armstrong had long desired to make an orrery for the purpose of
+instructing a few children and friends, but had never done anything
+towards it, partly for lack of time, and partly for lack of skill with
+joinery tools.  He now, however, had in Farrow at once a willing pupil
+and an artist, and the work went forward in Farrow's house, Miriam
+watching its progress with great interest.  She could even contribute
+her share, and the graduation of the rim was left to her, a task she
+performed with accuracy after a few failures in pencil.  It was a
+handsome instrument when it was completed.  The relative distances of
+the planets from the sun could not be preserved, nor their relative
+magnitudes; but what was of more importance, their relative velocities
+in their orbits were maintained.  The day came when the machine was to
+be first used.  Miriam insisted that there should be no experiments
+with it beforehand.  She desired, even at the risk of disappointment,
+to see a dramatic start into existence.  She did not wish her pleasure
+to be spoiled and her excitement to be diminished by trials.  Her
+husband humoured her, but secretly he took care that every preventible
+chance of a breakdown should be removed.  When she was absent, he
+tested every pinion and every cog, eased a wheel here and an axle
+there, and in truth what he had to do in this way with file and
+sandpaper was almost equal to the labour spent upon saw and chisel.
+Infinite adjustment was necessary to make the idea a noiseless, smooth
+practical success, and infinite precautions had to be taken and devices
+invented which were not foreseen when the drawing first appeared on
+paper.  With some of these difficulties Miriam, of course, was
+acquainted.  They would not probably have been so great to a
+professional instrument-maker, but they were very considerable to an
+amateur.  Farrow selected the best-seasoned wood he could find, but it
+frequently happened that after it was cut it warped a little, and the
+slightest want of truth threw all the connected part out of gear.
+Miriam learned something when she saw that a wheel whose revolution was
+not in a perfect plane could give rise to so much annoyance, and she
+learned something also when she saw how her husband, in the true spirit
+of a genuine craftsman, remained discontented if there was the
+slightest looseness in a bearing.
+
+"Do you think it matters?" said she.
+
+"Matters!  Don't you see that if it goes on it gets worse?  Every
+wobble increases the next, and not only so, it sets the whole thing
+wobbling."
+
+"Couldn't you manage to put a piece on?  Suppose you lined that hole
+with something."
+
+"Oh, no!  Not the slightest use; out it must come, and a new one must
+be put in."
+
+At length the day came for the start.  Farrow had made a trial by
+himself the night before, and nothing could be better.  Mr. Armstrong
+came over, and after tea they all three went upstairs into the large
+garret which had been used as a workshop.  The great handle was taken
+down and fitted into its place, Mr. Armstrong standing at one end and
+Miriam and her husband at the other.  Obedient to the impulse, every
+planet at once answered; Mercury with haste, and Saturn with such
+deliberation that scarcely any motion was perceptible.  The Earth spun
+its diurnal round, the Moon went forward in her monthly orbit.  The
+lighted ground-glass globe which did duty for the sun showed night and
+day and the seasons.  Miriam was transported, when suddenly there was a
+jerk and a stop.  Something was wrong, and Farrow, who was fortunately
+turning with great caution, gave a cry such as a man might utter who
+was suddenly struck a heavy blow.  He recovered himself instantly, and
+luckily at the very first glance saw what was the matter.  The nicety
+of his own handicraft was the cause of the disaster.  A shaving not
+much thicker than a piece of writing-paper had dropped between two
+cogs.  A gentle touch of a quarter of an inch backwards released it.
+
+"Hooray!" he cried in his mad delight, and the mimic planets
+recommenced their journeys as silently almost as their great archetypes
+outside.
+
+"Strange," he said with a smile, "that such a chip as that should upset
+the whole solar system."
+
+Miriam looked at him for a moment inquiringly, and then fell to
+watching the orrery again.  Slowly the moon waxed and waned.  Slowly
+the winter departed from our latitude on the little ball representing
+our dwelling-place, and the summer came; and as she still watched,
+slowly and almost unconsciously her arms crept round her husband's
+waist.
+
+"That is a fair representation," said Mr. Armstrong, "of all that is
+directly connected with us, excepting, of course, as I have told you,
+that we could not keep the distances."  A little later on, although he
+disapproved of "gaping," as he called it, he taught Miriam so much of
+geometry as was sufficient to make her understand what he meant when he
+told her that a fixed star yielded no parallax, and that the earth was
+consequently the merest speck of dust in the universe.  She found his
+simple trigonometry very, very hard, but to her husband it was easy,
+and with his help she succeeded.
+
+One afternoon, wet and dreary, Miriam had taken up her book.  There was
+nothing to do in the shop, and Mr. Farrow entered the parlour in one of
+his idle moods, repeating the same behaviour which had so often
+distressed Miriam when she was reading anything for which he did not
+care.  She had recovered from the dust upstairs a ragged volume in
+paper boards, and she was musing over the lines--
+
+  "But bound and fixed in fettered solitude
+  To pine, the prey of every changing mood."
+
+The poem was about as remote in its whole conception and treatment from
+Mr. Farrow as it could well be, and his monkey-tricks exasperated her.
+She shut her book in wrath and misery, left the room, dressed, and went
+out.  The sky had cleared, and just after the sunset there lay a long
+lake of tenderest bluish-green above the horizon in the west, bounded
+on its upper coast by the dark grey cloud which the wind was slowly
+bearing eastward.  In the midst of that lake of bluish-green lay Venus,
+glittering like molten silver.  Miriam's first thought was her husband.
+She always thought of him when she looked at planets or stars, because
+he was so intimately connected with them in her mind.  She waited till
+it was late and she then turned homewards.  A man overtook her whom she
+recognised at once as Fitchew the jobbing gardener, porter, rough
+carpenter, creature of all work in Cowfold, one of the honestest souls
+in the place.  He had his never-failing black pipe in his mouth, which
+he removed for a moment in order to bid her good-night.  She kept up
+with him, for it was dusk, and she was glad to walk by his side.
+Fitchews had lived in Cowfold for centuries.  An old parson always
+maintained that the name was originally Fitz-Hugh, but this particular
+representative of the family was certainly not a Fitz-Hugh but a
+Fitchew, save that he was as independent as a baron, and,
+notwithstanding his poverty, cared little or nothing what people
+thought about him.  He could neither read nor write, and was full of
+the most obstinate and absurd prejudices.  He was incredulous of
+everything which was said to him by people with any education, but what
+he had heard from those who were as uneducated as himself, or the
+beliefs, if such they can be called, which grew in his skull
+mysteriously, by spontaneous generation, he held most tenaciously.  His
+literature was Cowfold, the people, the animals, the inanimate objects
+of which it was made up, and his criticism on these was often just.  He
+never could be persuaded to enter either church or chapel.  Of the
+arguments for Christianity, of the undesigned coincidences in the
+Bible, of the evidence from prophecy, of the metaphysical necessity for
+an incarnation and atonement, he knew nothing, and it was a marvel to
+all respectable young persons how Fitchew, whose ignorance would
+disgrace a charity child, and who did not know that the world was
+round, or the date of the battle of Hastings, should set himself up
+against those who were so superior to him.
+
+"What should we say," observed the superintendent of the Dissenting
+Sunday-school one day to one of his classes, having Fitchew in his
+mind, "of a man who, if he was on a voyage in a ship commanded by a
+captain with a knowledge of navigation, should refuse in a storm to
+obey orders, affirming that they were all of no use, and should betake
+himself to his own little raft?"
+
+Curiously enough, the Sunday before, the vicar, having the Dissenter in
+his mind, had said just the same of "unlettered schismatics," as he
+called them.
+
+Fitchew always had one argument for those friends who strove to convert
+him.  "I don't see as them that goes to church are any better than them
+as don't.  What's he know about it?" meaning the parson or the
+minister, as the case might be.
+
+Fitchew was very rough and coarse, and rather grasping in his dealings
+with those who employed him, not so much because he was naturally mean,
+but because he was always determined that well-dressed folk should not
+"put on him."  Nevertheless, he was in his way sympathetic and even
+tender, particularly to those persons who suffered as he did, for he
+was afflicted with a kind of nervous dyspepsia, not infrequent even
+amongst the poor, and it kept him awake at night and gave him the
+"horrors."
+
+"Well, Fitchew, are you any better?" said Miriam.
+
+"Bad just now.  Ain't had no regular sleep for a fortnight.  Last night
+it was awful.  I kicked about and sat up; the noise in my ears was
+something, I can tell you; and then the wind in me!  It's my belief
+that that there noise in my ears is the wind a coming out through them.
+I couldn't stand it any longer, and I got up and walked up and down the
+road.  Would you believe it, the missus never stirred; there she lay
+like a stone, and when I came in she says to me, 'Wot's the matter with
+you?'  That's just like her.  She goes to bed, turns round, and never
+knows nothing of anything till the morning.  I could, have druv my head
+agin the door-post."
+
+"Well, she cannot help sleeping."
+
+"No," after a long pause, "that's true enough.  I tell you what it
+is--_I_ don't want to live for ever."
+
+"Cannot you do anything to help yourself?  Have you seen the doctor?"
+
+"Doctor!" in great scorn.  "He's no more use than that there dog behind
+me, nor yet half so much.  I am better when I am at work, that's all as
+I can tell."
+
+"Have you had plenty to do lately?"
+
+"No, not much.  Folk are allers after me in the summer-time, but in the
+winter, when their gardens don't want doing, they never have nothing to
+say to me.  There's one thing about my missus, though.  She's precious
+careful.  I never touches the money part of the business.  So we get's
+along."
+
+Miriam knew the "missus" well.  She was a little thin-lipped woman,
+who, notwithstanding her poverty, was most particularly clean.  No
+speck of dirt was to be seen on her person or in her cottage, but she
+was as hard as flint.  She never showed the least affection for her
+husband.  They had married late in life--why, nobody could tell--and
+had one child, a girl, whom the mother seemed to disregard just as she
+did her husband, saving that she dressed her and washed her with the
+same care which she bestowed on her kettle and candlesticks.
+
+"It's a good thing for you, Fitchew, that she is what she is."
+
+Fitchew hesitated for some time.
+
+"Yes, well, I said to myself, after I'd had a cup of tea and something
+to eat this morning--I didn't say it afore then, though--that it might
+be wuss.  If she was allus a slaverin' on me and a pityin' me, it
+wouldn't do me no good; and then we are as we are, and we must make the
+best of it."
+
+When Miriam parted from Fitchew she had still ten minutes' walk.
+Before the ten minutes had expired the black veil of rain-cloud was
+rolled still farther to the east, and the crescent of the young moon
+gleamed in the dying twilight.
+
+It poured with rain nevertheless during the night Miriam lay and
+listened, thinking it would be wet and miserable on the following day.
+She dropped off to sleep, and at four she rose and went to the window
+and opened it wide.  In streamed the fresh south-west morning air,
+pure, delicious, scented with all that was sweet from fields and woods,
+and the bearer inland even as far as Cowfold of Atlantic vitality,
+dissipating fogs, disinfecting poisons--the Life-Giver.
+
+She put on her clothes silently, went downstairs and opened the
+back-door.  The ever-watchful dog, hearing in his deepest slumbers the
+slightest noise, moved in his kennel, but recognised her at once and
+was still.  She called to him to follow her, and he joyfully obeyed.
+He would have broken out into tumultuous barking if she had not
+silenced him instantly, and he was forced to content himself with
+leaping up at her and leaving marks of his paws all over her cloak.
+Not a soul was to be seen, and she went on undisturbed till she came to
+her favourite spot where she had first met Mr. Armstrong.  She paced
+about for a little while, and then sat down and once more watched the
+dawn.  It was not a clear sky, but barred towards the east with cloud,
+the rain-cloud of the night.  She watched and watched, and thought
+after her fashion, mostly with incoherence, but with rapidity and
+intensity.  At last came the first flash of scarlet upon the bars, and
+the dead storm contributed its own share to the growing beauty.  The
+rooks were now astir, and flew, one after the other, in an irregular
+line eastwards black against the sky.  Still the colour spread, until
+at last it began to rise into pure light, and in a moment more the
+first glowing point of the disc was above the horizon.  Miriam fell on
+her knees against the little seat and sobbed, and the dog, wondering,
+came and sat by her and licked her face with tender pity.  Presently
+she recovered, rose, went home, let herself in softly before her
+husband was downstairs, and prepared the breakfast.  He soon appeared,
+was in the best of spirits, and laughed at her being able to leave the
+room without waking him.  She looked happy, but was rather quiet at
+their meal; and after he had caressed the cat for a little while, he
+pitched her, as he had done before, on Miriam's lap.  She was about to
+get up to cut some bread and butter, and she went behind him and kissed
+the top of his head.  He turned round, his eyes sparkling, and tried to
+lay hold of her, but she stepped backward and eluded him.  He mused a
+little, and when she sat down he said in a tone which for him was
+strangely serious--
+
+"Thank you, my dear; that was very, very sweet."
+
+
+
+
+MICHAEL TREVANION.
+
+Michael Trevanion was a well-to-do stonemason in the town of Perran in
+Cornwall.  He was both working-man and master, and he sat at one end of
+the heavy stone-saw, with David Trevenna, his servant, at the other, each
+under his little canopy to protect them a trifle from the sun and rain,
+slowly and in full view of the purple Cornish sea, sawing the stone for
+hours together: the water dripped slowly on the saw from a little can
+above to keep the steel cool, and occasionally they interchanged a word
+or two--always on terms of perfect equality, although David took wages
+weekly and Michael paid them.  Michael was now a man of about five and
+forty.  He had married young and had two children, of whom the eldest was
+a youth just one and twenty.  Michael was called by his enemies
+Antinomian.  He was fervently religious, upright, temperate, but given
+somewhat to moodiness and passion.  He was singularly shy of talking
+about his own troubles, of which he had more than his share at home, but
+often strange clouds cast shadows upon him, and the reasons he gave for
+the change observable in him were curiously incompetent to explain such
+results.  David, who had watched him from the other end of the saw for
+twenty years, knew perfectly what these attacks of melancholy or wrath
+meant, and that, though their assigned cause lay in the block before them
+or the weather, the real cause was indoors.  His trouble was made worse,
+because he could not understand why he received no relief, although he
+had so often laid himself open before the Lord, and wrestled for help in
+prayer.  In his younger days he had been subject to great temptation.
+One night he had nearly fallen, but an Invisible Power seized him.  "It
+was no more I," he said, "than if somebody had come and laid hold of me
+by the scruff of my neck," and he was forced away in terror upstairs to
+his bedroom, where he went on his knees in agony, and the Devil left him,
+and he became calm and pure.  But no such efficient help was given him in
+the trial of his life.  He knew in his better moments, that the refusal
+of grace was the Lord's own doing, and he supposed that it was due to His
+love and desire to try him; but upon this assurance he could not
+continually rest.  It slipped away from under him, and at times he felt
+himself to be no stronger than the merest man of the world.
+
+His case was very simple and very common--the simplest, commonest case in
+life.  He married, as we have said, when he was young, before he knew
+what he was doing, and after he had been married twelvemonths, he found
+he did not care for his wife.  When they became engaged, he was in the
+pride of youth, but curbed by his religion.  He mistook passion for love;
+reason was dumb, and had nothing to do with his choice; he made the one,
+irretrievable false step and was ruined.  No strong antipathy developed
+itself; there were no quarrels, but there was a complete absence of
+anything like confidence.  Michael had never for years really consulted
+his wife in any difficulty, because he knew he could not get any advice
+worth a moment's consideration; and he often contrasted his lot with that
+of David, who had a helpmate like that of the left arm to the right, who
+knew everything about his affairs, advised him in every perplexity, and
+cheered him when cast down--a woman on whom he really depended.  As David
+knew well enough, although he never put it in the form of a proposition,
+there is no joy sweeter than that begotten by the dependence of the man
+upon the woman for something she can supply but he cannot--not affection
+only, but assistance.
+
+Michael, as we have said, had two children, a girl and a boy, the boy
+being the eldest.  Against neither could he ever utter a word of
+complaint.  They were honest and faithful.  But the girl, Eliza, although
+unlike her mother, was still less like her father, and had a plain mind,
+that is to say, a mind endowed with good average common sense, but
+unrelieved by any touch of genius or poetry.  Her intellect was solid but
+ordinary--a kind of homely brown intellect, untouched by sunset or
+sunrise tint.  A strain of the mother was in her, modified by the
+influence of the father, and the result was a product like neither father
+nor mother, so cunning are the ways of spiritual chemistry.  The boy,
+Robert Trevanion, on the contrary, was his father; not only with no
+apparent mixture of the mother, but his father intensified.  The outside
+fact was of far less consequence to him than the self-created medium
+through which it was seen, and his happiness depended much more
+intimately on himself as he chanced to be at the time than on the world
+around him.  He was apprenticed to his father, and the two were bound
+together by the tie of companionship and friendship, intertwined with
+filial and paternal love.  What Eliza said, although it was right and
+proper, never interested the father; but when Robert spoke, Michael
+invariably looked at him, and often reflected upon his words for hours.
+
+There was in the town of Perran a girl named Susan Shipton.  Michael knew
+very little of the family, save that her father was a draper and went to
+church.  Susan was reputed to be one of the beauties of Perran, although
+opinion was divided.  She had--what were not common in Cornwall--light
+flaxen hair, blue eyes, and a rosy face, somewhat inclined to be plump.
+The Shiptons lay completely outside Michael's circle.  They were mere
+formalists in religion, fond of pleasure, and Susan especially was much
+given to gaiety, went to picnics and dances, rowed herself about in the
+bay with her friends, and sauntered about the town with her father and
+mother on Sunday afternoon.  She was also fond of bathing, and was a good
+swimmer.  Michael hardly knew how to put his objection into words, but he
+nevertheless had a horror of women who could swim.  It seemed to him an
+ungodly accomplishment.  He did not believe for a moment that St. Paul
+would have sanctioned it, and he sternly forbade Eliza the use of one of
+the bathing-machines which had lately been introduced into Perran for the
+benefit of the few visitors who had discovered its charms.
+
+It was a summer's morning in June, and Robert had gone along the shore on
+business to a house which was being built a little way out of the town.
+The tide was running out fast to the eastward.  A small river came down
+into the bay, and the current was sweeping round the rocks to the left in
+a great curve at a distance of about two hundred yards from the beach.
+Inside the curve was smooth water, which lay calmly rippling in the sun,
+while at its edge the buoys marking the channel were swaying to and fro,
+and the stream lifted itself against them, swung past them, with bright
+multitudinous eddies, and went out to sea.  Half-way in the shallows was
+one of the bathing-machines, and Robert saw that a girl whom he could not
+recognise was having a bathe.  She swam well, and presently she started
+off straight outwards.  Robert watched her for a moment, and saw her go
+closer and closer to the dangerous line.  He knew she could not see it so
+well as he could, and he knew too that the buoys which were placed to
+guide small craft into the harbour were well in the channel, and that at
+least twenty yards this side of them the ebb would be felt, and with such
+force that no woman could make headway against it.  Suddenly he saw that
+her course was deflected to the left, and he knew that unless some help
+could arrive she would be lost.  In an instant his coat, waistcoat, and
+boots were off, and he was rushing over the sandy shallows, which
+fortunately stretched out a hundred yards before he was out of his depth.
+Susan--for it was Miss Shipton--had now perceived her peril and had
+turned round, but she was overpowered, and he heard a shriek for help.
+Raising himself out of the water as far as he could, he called out and
+signalled to her not to go dead against the tide, or even to try and
+return, but to go on and edge her way to its margin, and so make for the
+point.  This she tried to do, but her strength began to fail--the drift
+was too much for her.  Meanwhile Robert went after her.  He was one of
+the best swimmers in Perran, but when he felt the cooler, deeper water,
+he was suddenly seized with a kind of fainting and a mist passed over his
+eyes.  He looked at the land, and he was in a moment convinced he should
+never set foot on it again.  He was on the point of sinking, when he
+bethought himself that if he was to die, he might just as well die after
+having put forth all his strength; and in an instant, as if touched by
+some divine spell, the agitation ceased, and he was himself again.  In
+three minutes more he was by Susan's side, had gripped her by the
+bathing-dress at the back of the neck, and had managed to avail himself
+of a little swirl which turned inwards just before the rocks were
+reached.  They were safe.  She nearly swooned, but recovered herself
+after a fit of sobbing.
+
+"I owe you my life, Mr. Trevanion; you've saved me--you've saved me."
+
+"Nonsense, Miss Shipton!"  He hardly knew what to say.  "I would not go
+so near the tide again, if I were you.  You had better get back to the
+machine as soon as you can and go home.  You are about done up."  So
+saying, he ran away to the place where he had left his coat, and went up
+into the town, thinking intently as he went.  Very earnestly he thought;
+so earnestly that he saw nothing of Perran, and nothing of his
+neighbours, who wondered at his dripping trousers; thinking very
+earnestly, not upon his own brave deed, nor even upon his strange attack
+of weakness, and equally strange recovery, but upon Miss Shipton as she
+stood by his side at the rock very earnestly picturing to himself her
+white arms, her white neck, her long hair falling to her waist, and her
+beautiful white feet, seen on the sand through the clear sun-sparkling
+water.
+
+Robert Trevanion, although brought up in the same school of philosophy as
+his father, belonged to another generation.  The time of my history is
+the beginning of the latter half of the present century, and Michael was
+already considered somewhat of a fossil.  Robert was inconsistent, as the
+old doctrine when it is decaying, or the new at its advent always is; but
+the main difference between Michael and Robert was not any distinct
+divergence, but that truths believed by Michael, and admitted by Robert,
+failed to impress Robert with that depth and sharpness of cut with which
+they were wrought into his father.  Mere assent is nothing; the question
+of importance is whether the figuration of the creed is dull or vivid--as
+vivid as the shadows of a June sun on a white house.  Brilliance of
+impression, is not altogether dependent on mere processes of proof, and a
+faultless logical demonstration of something which is of eternal import
+may lie utterly uninfluential and never disturb us.
+
+Robert walked out the next morning to the house he went to visit the day
+before.  Nobody save Miss Shipton and himself knew anything about his
+adventure.  He had made some excuse for his wet clothes.  The beach of
+the little village in the early part of the day was almost always
+deserted, and the man who attended to the machine had been lying on his
+back on the shingle smoking his pipe during the few minutes occupied in
+Miss Shipton's rescue.  It was settled weather.  The sky was cloudless,
+and the blue seemed on fire.  What little wind there was, was from the
+south-south-east, and every outline quivered in the heat.  The water
+inshore was absolutely still, and of such an azure as nobody whose sea is
+that of the Eastern Coast or the Channel can imagine.  A boat lay here
+and there idle, with its shadow its perfect double in unwavering detail
+and blackness.  Just beyond this cerulean lake the river ebb, as
+yesterday, rippled swiftly round Deadman's Nose; the buoys, with their
+heads all eastward, breaking the stream as it impatiently hurried past
+them on its mysterious errand.  Beyond and beyond lay the ocean,
+unruffled, melting into the white haze which united it with the sky on
+the horizon.  Robert loved the summer, and especially a burning summer.
+The sun, of which other persons complained, some perhaps sincerely, but
+for the most part hypocritically--can anybody really hate the
+sun?--rejoiced him.  He loved to be out in it when the light on the
+unsheltered Cornish rocks and in the whitewashed street was so "glaring,"
+as silly people called it, that they put up parasols and umbrellas, and
+the warmth which made him withdraw his hand smartly from the old anchor
+that lay on the grass just above high-water-mark, exhilarated him like
+wine.  He was not a poet, he knew nothing of Greek mythology; and yet on
+summer days like these, the landscape and seascape were all changed for
+him.  To say that they were a dream would be untrue--they were the
+reality; the hideous winter, with its damp fogs and rain, were the dream;
+and yet upon seascape and landscape rested such a miraculous charm that
+they seemed visionary rather than actual.  As he walked along, he
+naturally thought of yesterday, and the light, the heat, and the colour
+naturally also renewed in him the picture which he had been continually
+repainting for himself since yesterday morning.  He went to the house,
+saw the stonework was going on all right, and as he returned, whom should
+he meet but Miss Shipton, who, undeterred by the fright of the day
+before, had just had another bathe, and was taking a turn along the cliff
+to dry her hair, which was hanging over her shoulders.  She was not by
+any means what is called "fast," but she knew how to dress herself.  She
+had a straw hat with a very large brim, a plain brown holland dress, a
+brown holland parasol, and pretty white shoes; for nothing would ever
+induce Miss Shipton to put her feet into the yellow abominations which
+most persons wore at Perran in the summer.
+
+Robert took off his cap.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Trevanion, I am so glad to see you.  You must have thought me
+such a queer creature.  I have not half thanked you.  But what could I
+do?  I couldn't write, and I couldn't call, and I thought you would not
+like a noise being made about it.  Yet you saved me from being drowned."
+
+"It was nothing, Miss Shipton," said Robert, smiling.  "You were in the
+ebb there, and I pulled you out of it--just twenty yards, that was all.
+I hope you haven't told anybody."
+
+"No; as I have said, I thought you wouldn't like it; but nevertheless,
+although it is all very well for you to talk in that way, I owe you my
+life."
+
+"Are you going any farther?"
+
+"Just a few steps till my hair is dry."
+
+He turned and walked by her side.
+
+"You see that the buoys are beyond where the channel really begins.  I
+once tried to swim round two of them, but it was as much as ever I could
+do to get back.  If I were you, I would give them a wide berth again; but
+if you should be caught, go on and do what we did yesterday--try to turn
+off into the back-stream just inside the point."
+
+"You may be sure I shall never go near them any more."
+
+"Unless you happen to see me," said Robert, his face flushed with his
+happy thought, "and then you will give me the pleasure of coming after
+you."
+
+She looked at him, shifted her parasol, and laughed a little.
+
+"Pleasure! really, Mr. Trevanion, were you not very much frightened?"
+
+"Not for myself, except just for an instant."
+
+"Oh, I was awfully frightened!  I thought I must give up.  I never, never
+shall forget that moment when you laid hold of me."
+
+"But you have been in the water again this morning."
+
+"Oh, yes!  I do enjoy it so, and of course I did not go far.  That stupid
+bathing-man, by the way, ought to have looked out yesterday.  He might
+have come in the boat and have saved you a wetting.  I believe he was
+asleep."
+
+"He is old, and I am very, very glad he did not see you.  Aren't you
+tired?  Would you not like to sit down a moment before we go back?"
+
+They sat down on one of the rocks near the edge of the water.
+
+"You are a very good swimmer, Mr. Trevanion."
+
+"No, not very; and yesterday I was particularly bad, for a kind of
+faintness came over me just before I reached you, and I thought I was
+done for."
+
+"Dear me! how dreadful!  How did you conquer it?"
+
+"Merely by saying to myself I would not give in, and I struggled with it
+for a minute and then it disappeared."
+
+"How strong you must be!  I am sure I could not do that."
+
+"Ah! there was something else, Miss Shipton.  You see, I had you ahead of
+me, and I thought I could be of some service to you."
+
+Miss Shipton made no direct reply, but threw some pebbles in the water.
+Robert felt himself gradually overcome, or nearly overcome, by what to
+him was quite new.  He could not keep his voice steady, and although what
+he said was poor and of no importance, it was charged with expressionless
+heat.  For example, Miss Shipton's parasol dropped and she stooped to
+pick it up.  "Let me pick it up," he said, and his lips quivered, and the
+let me pick it up--a poor, little, thin wire of words--was traversed by
+an electric current raising them to white-hot glow, and as powerful as
+that which flows through many mightier and more imposing conductors.
+What are words?  "Good-bye," for example, is said every morning by
+thousands of creatures in the London suburbs as they run to catch their
+train, and the present writer has heard it said by a mother to her
+beloved boy as she stepped on board the tug which was about to leave the
+big steamer, and she knew she would never see him again.  Robert handed
+her the parasol, and unconsciously, by that curious sympathy by which we
+are all affected, without any obvious channel of communication, she felt
+the condition in which his nerves were.  She was a little uncomfortable,
+and, rising, said she thought it was time she was at home.  They rose and
+walked back slowly till their paths parted.
+
+The next day Robert renewed his walk, but there was no Miss Shipton.  The
+summer heat had passed into thunderstorms, and these were succeeded by
+miserable grey days with mist, confusing sea, land, and sky, and
+obliterating every trace of colour.  As he went backwards and forwards to
+the house over the hill, he watched every corner and turned round a
+hundred times, although his reason would have told him that to expect
+Miss Shipton in the rain was ridiculously absurd.
+
+Michael Trevanion loved his son with a father's love, but with a mother's
+too.  He rejoiced to talk with him as his father and friend, but there
+was in him also that wild, ferocious passion for his child which
+generally belongs to the woman, a passion which in its intense vitality
+forecasts, apprehends, and truly discerns danger where, to the mere
+intellect, there is nothing.  Michael wondered a little at Robert's
+unusually frequent visits to his work over the hill, and as he was in the
+town one morning, he determined to cross the hill himself and see how the
+house was going on.  The mist, which had hung about for a week, had
+gradually rolled itself into masses as the sun rose higher.  It was no
+longer without form and void, but was detaching itself into huge
+fragments, which let in the sun and were gradually sucked up by him.
+Rapidly everything became transformed, and lo! as if by enchantment, the
+whole sky resumed once more its deepest blue, the perfect semicircle of
+the horizon sharply revealed itself, and vessels five miles off were
+visible to their spars.  Michael reached the end of his journey and
+waited, looking out from one of the upper stories.  He saw nothing of the
+splendour of the scene before him.  He was restless, he did not quite
+know why.  He could not tell exactly why he was there, but nevertheless
+he determined to remain.  He generally carried a Bible in his pocket, and
+he turned where he had turned so often before, to the fifteenth chapter
+of Luke, and read the parable of the prodigal son.  He had affixed his
+own interpretation to that story, and he always held that the point of it
+was not the love of the father, but the magnificent repentance of the boy
+who could simply say, "_I have sinned against Heaven and before thee, and
+am no more worthy to be called thy son; make me as one of thy hired
+servants_."  No wonder the fatted calf was killed for him.  No excuses; a
+noble confession and a trust in his father's affection for him!  His own
+Robert would never go wrong, but if he did, it would cost nothing to
+forgive him.  Then, as he often did, he fell on his knees, and, in front
+of the space where the window was to come, which would open on a little
+southern balcony looking over the sea, there, amid the lumps of plaster
+and shavings, he besought his Maker to preserve the child.  Michael was
+sincere in his prayers, nakedly sincere, and yet there were some things
+he kept to himself even when he was with his God.  He never mentioned his
+disappointment with his wife, never a word; but he assumed a right to the
+perfect enjoyment of Robert by way of compensation.  Calvinist as he was
+to the marrow, he would almost have impeached the Divine justice if
+Robert had been removed from him.
+
+Robert, walking leisurely, turning to look behind him for the hundredth
+time, had spied Miss Shipton on her road to the town from her accustomed
+plunge.  He intercepted her by going round a meadow to the left at a
+great rate, and found himself face to face with her as she was about to
+pass the corner.  The third side of the meadow round which he had raced
+was an unfinished road, and was a way, though not the usual way, back to
+Perran.
+
+"Good morning, Miss Shipton.  Are you going home?"
+
+"Yes!  I suppose you are going to your house."
+
+"Yes," and Robert walked slowly back along the way he had come, Miss
+Shipton accompanying him, for it was the way home.  When they came to the
+corner, however, they both, without noticing it, went eastward, and not
+to the town.
+
+"Should you like to be a sailor, Mr. Trevanion?" said Miss Shipton,
+catching sight of the fishing vessels over the low sea-beaten hedge.
+
+"No, I think not.  At least it would depend----"
+
+"Depend on what?"
+
+"I should not like to be away for weeks during the North Sea fishing,
+if----"
+
+"If it were very cold?"
+
+"Oh, no; that is not what I meant--if I had a wife at home who cared for
+me and watched for me!"
+
+"Really, Mr. Trevanion, if you were a fisherman you would not take things
+so seriously.  It would all come as a matter of course.  Yon would be
+busy with your nets, and have no time to think of her."
+
+"But she might think of me."
+
+"Oh, well, perhaps she might now and then; but she would have her house
+to look after, and all her friends would be near her."
+
+"On stormy nights," said Robert, musingly.
+
+"How very serious you are!  Such a lovely day, too--a nice time to be
+talking about stormy nights!  Of course there are stormy nights, but the
+boats can run into harbour, and if they cannot, the men are not always
+drowned."
+
+"Certainly not; how foolish, and to think of coming home after five or
+six weeks on the Doggerbank--oh me!  But here is the very rock where we
+sat the other morning.  I am sure you are tired, let us sit down again;
+your hair is not dry yet."
+
+They sat down.
+
+"It is quite wet still," and Robert ventured to touch it, putting his
+hand underneath it.
+
+"An awful plague it is!  Horrid sandy-coloured stuff, and such a nuisance
+in the water!  I think I shall have it cut short."
+
+"I am sure you won't.  Sandy-coloured! it is beautiful."
+
+Miss Shipton tossed her parasol about, shaking her hair loose from his
+fingers.
+
+"When it is spread out in the sunshine," said Robert, as he separated a
+little piece of it between his fingers, "the sun shows its varying
+shades.  How lovely they are!"  His hand went a little higher, till it
+touched the back of her neck.
+
+"On stormy nights.--on stormy nights," he almost whispered, "I should
+think of you if you did not think of me."
+
+The hand went a little farther under the hair, his head inclined to it,
+and he was intoxicated with its own rich scent mingled with, that of the
+sweet sea-water.  He trembled with emotion from head to foot.  What is
+there in life like this?  Old as creation, ever new; and under the almost
+tropical sun, fronting the ocean, in the full heat of youth, he drew her
+head to his.  She yielded, and in a moment his eyes and mouth were buried
+in her loose-clustering tresses.  Before, however, he could say another
+word he was interrupted.  A sheep, feeding above them, alarmed by a
+stranger's approach, rushed down past them; and hastily recovering
+himself, Robert looked up.  There was nobody, but he saw that they were
+near his house, and that his father, who had just come to the window, was
+looking down straight upon them.  Miss Shipton immediately said that it
+was late, rose, and walked homewards; and Robert alone went up the cliff.
+Michael had seen the girl walk away and had recognised her, but he had
+not seen what had preceded her departure.  Instantly, however, he
+penetrated the secret, and his first words when Robert presented himself
+were--
+
+"Why, Robert, that was Miss Shipton."
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"What were she and you doing here?"
+
+"We happened to meet."
+
+There was something in the tone in which Robert replied which showed the
+father at once that his son's confidence in him was not illimitable, as
+he had believed it to be hitherto.  It is a heart-breaking time for
+father and mother when they first become aware that the deepest secrets
+in their children are intrusted not to them, but to others.  Michael felt
+repelled and was silent; but after a while, as they both were leaning
+over the garden-wall and gazing upon the water, he said--
+
+"Mere worldlings, those Shiptons, Robert!"
+
+"I do not know much about them, but they seem an honest, good sort of
+people."
+
+"Ah! yes, my son; they may be all that.  But what is it?  They are not
+the Lord's."
+
+Robert made no reply, and presently father and son left the house and
+went back to Perran to their work, uncommunicative.
+
+It was a peculiar misfortune for a man of Michael's temperament that he
+had nobody save his son who could assist him in the shaping of his
+resolves or in the correction of his conclusions.  Brought up in a narrow
+sect, self-centred, moody, he needed continually that wholesome twist to
+another point of the compass which intercourse with equals gives.  He was
+continually prone to subjection under the rigorous domination of a single
+thought, from which he deduced inference after inference, ending in
+absurdity, which would have been dissipated in an instant by discussion.
+We complain of people because they are not original, but we do not ask
+what their originality, if they had any, would be worth.  Better a
+thousand times than the originality of most of us is the average
+common-sense which is not our own exclusively, but shared with millions
+of our fellow-beings, and is not due to any one of them.  Michael ought
+to have talked over the events of the morning with his wife; but alas!
+his wife's counsel was never sought, and not worth having.  He did seek
+counsel at the throne of heavenly grace that night, but the answer given
+by the oracle was framed by himself.  He was in sore straits.  Something
+seemed to have interposed itself between him and Robert, and when,
+instead of the old unveiled frankness, Robert was reticent and even
+suspicious, Michael's heart almost broke, and he went up to his room, and
+shutting the door, wept bitter tears.  His sorrow clothed itself, even at
+its uttermost, with no words of his own, but always in those of the Book.
+
+"O my son Absalom!" he cried, "my son, my son, Absalom!  Would God I had
+died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
+
+He remembered also what his own married life had been; he always trusted
+that Robert would have a wife who would be a help to him, and he felt
+sure that this girl Shipton, with her pretty rosy face and blue eyes, had
+no brains.  To think that his boy should repeat the same inexplicable
+blunder, that she was _silly_, that he would never hear from her lips a
+serious word!  What will she be if trouble comes on him?  What will she
+be when a twelvemonth has passed?  What will _he_ be when he sits by his
+fireside in long winter evenings, alone with her, and finds she cannot
+interest him for a moment?
+
+Worse still, she was not a child of God.  He did not know that she ever
+sought the Lord.  She went to church once a day and read her prayers, and
+that was all.  She was not one of the chosen, and she might corrupt him,
+and he might fall away, and so commit the sin against the Holy Ghost  "O
+Lord, O Lord!" he prayed one evening, in rebellion rather than as a
+suppliant, "what has Thy servant done that Thou shouldst visit him thus?"
+He almost mutinied, but he was afraid, and his religion came to his
+rescue, and he broke down into "And yet not my will, the will of the
+meanest of sinners, but Thine be done."  He made up his mind once or
+twice that he would solemnly remonstrate with his son, but his aspect was
+such whenever the subject was approached, even from a distance, that he
+dared not.  Hitherto the boy had joyfully submitted to be counselled, and
+had sought his father's direction, but now, if the conversation turned in
+a certain direction, a kind of savage reserve was visible, at which
+Michael was frightened.  He was a man of exceedingly slow conception.
+For days and days he would often debate within himself, and at the end
+the fog was as thick as ever.  He complained once to David Trevenna of
+this failing, and David gave him a useful piece of practical advice.
+
+"Leave it alone, master.  The more you thinks, the more you muddle
+yourself.  Leave it alone, and when it comes into your head, try to get
+rid of it.  In a week or so the thing will do more for itself than you'll
+do for it.  It will settle, like new beer, and come clear enough.  That's
+what my missus has often said to me, and I know she's right."
+
+But, do what he might, Michael could not in this instance leave it alone.
+He cast about incessantly for some device by which he could break his son
+loose from the girl.  It was all in vain.  She might be frivolous, but
+there was nothing against her character, and he saw evident signs that if
+he attempted any exercise of authority he would lose Robert altogether in
+open revolt.  For Robert, it must be remembered, had never scattered his
+strength in loose love.  He had grown up to manhood in perfect innocence,
+and all his stored-up passion spent itself in idealising the object which
+by chance had provoked it.
+
+Michael one night--it was a Sunday night--he was always worse on Sundays
+when he had not been at work--was unable to sleep, and rose and read the
+Book.  He turned to the Epistle to the Romans, a favourite epistle with
+him, and deservedly so, for there we come face to face with the divine
+apostle, with a reality unobscured by miracle or myth.  And such a
+reality!  Christianity becomes no longer a marvel, for a man with that
+force and depth of experience is sufficient to impose a religion on the
+whole human race, no matter what the form of the creed may be.  Michael
+read in the ninth chapter, "_I could wish that myself were accursed from
+Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh_."  What did
+Paul mean?  Accursed from Christ!  What _could_ he mean save that he was
+willing to be damned to save those whom he loved.  Why not?  Why should
+not a man be willing to be damned for others?  The damnation of a single
+soul is shut up in itself, and may be the means of saving not only
+others, but their children and a whole race.  Damnation!  It is awful,
+horrible; millions of years, with no relief, with no light from the Most
+High, and in subjection to His Enemy.  "And yet, if it is to save--if it
+is to save Robert," thought Michael, "God give me strength--I could
+endure it.  Did not the Son Himself venture to risk the wrath of the
+Father that He might redeem man?  What am I?  what is my poor self?"  And
+Michael determined that night that neither his life in this world nor in
+the next, if he could rescue his child, should be of any account.
+
+How sublime a thing is this dust or dirt we call man!  We grovel in view
+of the vast distances of the fixed stars and their magnitudes, but these
+distances and these dimensions are a delusion.  There is nothing grander
+in Sirius than in a pebble, nor anything more worthy of admiration and
+astonishment in his remoteness than in the length of Oxford Street.  The
+true sublime is in the self-negation of the martyr, and it became doubly
+magnificent in the case of Michael, who was willing not merely to give up
+a finite existence for something other than himself--to be shot and so
+end, or to be burnt with a hope of following glory--but to submit for
+ever to separation and torment, if only he might shield his child from
+God's displeasure.  It may be objected that such a resolution is
+impossible.  Doubtless it is now altogether incredible; but it is so
+because we no longer know what religion means, or what is the effect
+produced upon the mind by the constant study of one book and a perfectly
+unconditional belief in it.  Furthermore, as before said, Michael never
+corrected himself or preserved his sanity by constant intercourse with
+his fellows.  He incessantly brooded, and the offspring of a soul like
+his, begotten on itself, is monstrous and grotesque.  He questioned
+himself and his oracle further.  What could Paul mean exactly?  God could
+not curse him if he did no wrong.  He could only mean that he was willing
+to sin and be punished provided Israel might live.  It was lawful then to
+tell a lie or perpetrate any evil deed in order to protect his child.
+Something suddenly crossed his mind; what it was we shall see later on.
+And yet the thought was too awful.  He could not endure to sin, not only
+against his Creator, but against his boy.  Perhaps God might pardon him
+after centuries of suffering; and yet He could not.  The gates of hell
+having once closed upon him, there could be no escape.  He struggled in
+agony, until at last he determined that, first of all, he would speak to
+Robert, although he knew it would be useless.  He would conquer the
+strange dread he had of remonstrance, and then, if that failed, he
+would--do anything.
+
+On the Sabbath following, as they came out of the meeting-house in the
+evening, Michael proposed to Robert that they should walk down to the
+shore.  It was a very unusual proposal, for walking on the Sabbath, save
+to and from the means of grace, was almost a crime, and Robert assented,
+not without some curiosity and even alarm.  The two went together in
+silence till they came to the deserted shore.   The sun had set behind
+the point on their right, and far away in the distance could he seen the
+beneficent interrupted ray of the revolving light.  Father and son walked
+side by side.
+
+"Robert," said Michael at last, "I have long wished to speak to you.  God
+knows I would not do it if He did not command me, but I cannot help it.
+I fear you have engaged yourself with a young woman who is not one of His
+children."
+
+"Who told you she was not, father?"
+
+"Who told me?  Why, Robert, it is notorious.  Who told me?  Is she not
+known to belong to the world? does she ever appear before the Lord?"
+
+"Do you think then, father, that because she does not come to our chapel
+she cannot be saved?"
+
+"No, you know I do not.  The Lord has His followers doubtless in other
+communions besides our own, but the Shiptons are not His."
+
+"You mean, I suppose, that they do not believe exactly what we believe,
+and that they go to church?"
+
+"No, no; I mean that she has not found Him, and that she is of the
+world--of the world!  O Robert, Robert! think what you are doing--that
+you will mate yourself with one who is not elect, that you may have
+children who will he the children of wrath.  You don't know what I have
+gone through for you.  I have wrestled and prayed before I could bring
+myself to do my duty and talk with you, and even now I cannot speak.
+What is it which chokes me?  O Robert, Robert!"
+
+But Robert, usually docile and tender, was hard and obdurate.  The image
+of Susan rose before his eyes with her head on his shoulder, and he
+thought to himself that it was necessary at once to make matters quite
+plain and stop all further trespass on his prerogative.  So it is, and so
+it ever has been.  For this cause shall a man leave father and mother and
+cleave to his wife.  There comes a time when the father and mother find
+that they must withdraw; but it is the order of the world, and has to be
+accepted, like sickness or death.
+
+"Father," said Robert, "I am not a boy, and you must allow me in these
+matters to judge for myself."  As he spoke his spirit rose; the image of
+the head on his shoulder, defenceless against attack save for him, became
+clearer and clearer, and words escaped him which he never afterwards
+forgot, nor did his father forget.  "And it is a shame--I say it is a
+shame to speak against her.  You know nothing about her.  Worldly! her
+children children of wrath, just because she is not of your way of
+thinking, and isn't--and isn't a humbug, as some of them are.  From
+anybody else I wouldn't stand it," and Robert turned sharply away and
+went home.
+
+Michael leant against a groyne to support himself, and looked over the
+water, seeing nothing.  At first he was angry, and if his son had been
+there, he could have struck him; but presently his anger gave way to
+pity, to hatred of the girl who had thus seduced him, and to a fixed
+determination to save him, whatever it might cost.  He pondered again and
+again over that verse of Paul's.  He did not believe that he should be
+excused if he did evil that good might come.  He knew that if he did
+evil, no matter what the result might be, the penalty to the uttermost
+farthing would be exacted.  If Christ's purpose to save mankind could not
+prevent the Divine anger being poured out on perfect innocence, how much
+greater would not that anger have been if it had been necessary for Him
+to sin in order to make the world's salvation sure!  Michael firmly
+believed, too, in the dreadful doctrine that a single lapse from the
+strait path is enough to damn a man for ever; that there is no finiteness
+in a crime which can be counterbalanced by finite expiation, but that sin
+is infinite.  Monstrous, we say; and yet it is difficult to find in the
+strictest Calvinism anything which is not an obvious dogmatic reflection
+of a natural fact, a mere transference to theology of what had been
+pressed upon the mind of the creator of the creed as an everyday law of
+the world.  A crime is infinite in its penalties, and the account is
+never really balanced, as many of us know too well, the lash being laid
+on us day after day, even to death, for the failings of fifty years ago.
+
+Michael, with his slow ways, remained many weeks undecided.  During these
+weeks he said nothing more to his son, nor did his son say anything to
+him upon the one subject.  Robert was more than ever deferent, and even
+more than ever affectionate, but there were no signs of any conversion on
+his part, and to his deference and affection his father paid no regard.
+He walked in a world by himself, shut up in it, and incessantly repeated
+the one question, how could he save his son's soul?  He pictured himself
+as a second Christ.  If the Christ, the mighty Saviour, felt His Father's
+wrath on that one dreadful night, it was only fitting that he, Michael, a
+man who was of so much less worth, should feel it for ever to accomplish
+a similar end.  He was a little exalted by his resolve, and spiritual
+pride began to show itself; so utterly impossible is it that the purest
+self-devotion should be, if we may use the word, chemically pure.  It is
+very doubtful if he ever fully realised what he was doing, just as it is
+doubtful whether in the time of liveliest conviction there has been a
+perfect realisation of the world to come.  Had he really appreciated the
+words "torment" and "infinite;" had he really put into "torment" the
+pangs of a cancer or a death through thirst; had he really put twenty
+years into "infinity," he would perhaps have recoiled.  Nevertheless, the
+fact remains that this man by some means or other had educated himself
+into complete self-obliteration for the sake of his child.  The present
+time is disposed to over-rate the intellectual virtues.  No matter how
+unselfish a woman may be, if she cannot discuss the new music or the new
+metaphysical poetry, she is nothing and nobody cares for her.  Centuries
+ago our standard was different, and it will have to be different again.
+We shall, it is to be hoped, spend ourselves not in criticism of the
+record of the saints who sat by the sepulchre, but we shall love as they
+loved.
+
+Michael comforted himself by a piece of sophistry.  He had made up his
+mind to attempt a stratagem, a wicked lie, if we choose to call it so,
+for his son's sake, and he was prepared to suffer the penalty for it.  If
+he had thought that in thus sinning he was sinning as an ordinary sinner,
+he perhaps could not have dared to commit the crime; he could not have
+faced the Almighty's displeasure.  But he thought that, although bound by
+the Divine justice to mete out to him all the punishment which the sin
+merited, God would, nevertheless, consider him as a sinner for His glory.
+
+One evening--the summer had not yet departed--father and son walked out
+to the house on the cliff.
+
+"Robert," said Michael suddenly, and with the strength of a man who
+gathers himself up to do what for a long time he has been afraid to do,
+and is even bolder apparently than if he had known no fear, "I have
+spoken my mind to you as God in heaven bade me about Miss Shipton, and
+this is the last word I shall say.  He knows that I have prayed for you
+from your childhood up--that I have prayed that, above everything, he
+would grant that you should have one of His own for your wife, who should
+bring up your children in the fear of the Lord.  He alone knows how I
+have wrestled for you day and night, ay, in the dark hours of the night;
+for you are my only son, and I looked that you and she whom God might
+choose for you should be the delight and support of my old age.  But it
+is not to be.  God has, for His own good purposes, not blessed me as He
+has blessed others, and the home for which I hoped I am not to have.  Oh,
+my son, my son!"  He had meant to say more, but at the moment he could
+not.
+
+"Father, father!" said Robert, much moved--the anger he usually felt at
+his father's references to Susan Shipton melting into pity--"why not?
+why not?  You don't know Susan; you condemn her just because she don't go
+to our meeting.  She shall love you like your own child."
+
+Another man would, perhaps, have relented, but his system was wrought
+into his very marrow--a part of himself in a manner incomprehensible.
+The distinction between the world and the Church is now nothing to us.
+We are on the best of terms with people who every Sunday are expressly
+assigned to everlasting fire.  But to Michael the distinction was what it
+was to Ephraim MacBriar.  The Spirit descended on him--whose spirit, it
+is not for us to say.
+
+"Are you sure of Miss Shipton, Robert?"
+
+"Sure of her, father!  What do you mean?"
+
+"Do you know what she has been in time past?"
+
+"I don't understand you."
+
+"Do you know why Cadman left the Shiptons?"
+
+Robert stopped suddenly as if struck by a blow, and then his behaviour
+instantly changed.  He completely forgot himself and was furious.
+
+"Father, I say it is a wicked, cruel shame--a wicked, cruel lie.  I do
+not care if I tell you so.  I will not listen to it," and he tore himself
+away.
+
+He believed it was a lie--believed it with the same distinctness as he
+believed in the existence of the hedge by his side which lacerated his
+hand as he turned round; and yet the lie struck him like a poisoned
+barbed arrow, and he could not drag himself loose from it.  No man could
+have loved Desdemona better than Othello, and yet, before there was any
+evidence, did he not say of Iago--
+
+              "This honest creature doubtless
+  Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds."
+
+He went home, and on his way to his room upstairs he passed through the
+little office in which he and his father made out their bills and kept
+their accounts.  On the desk lay half a sheet of a letter.  He looked at
+it at first mechanically, and then began to read with the most intense
+interest.  It was only half a sheet, and the other half was nowhere to be
+found.  It ran as follows:--
+
+
+"and I can assure you I cannot afford to marry.  Besides, I don't know
+that she cares anything for me now.  It was very wrong; but, sir, when
+you remember that I am a young man and that Susan was so attractive, I
+think I may be forgiven.  I hope some day to make her amends if she still
+loves me, but, sir, I must wait.--Yours truly,
+
+         "WALTER CADMAN.
+
+"MR. MICHAEL TREVANION."
+
+
+This was the plot.  The Shiptons some short time ago had an assistant in
+their employ, who was dismissed for improper intimacy with a servant-girl
+named Susan Coleman, who lived next door.  As was the case with most
+servant-girls in those days, nobody ever heard her surname, and she was
+known by the name of Susan only.  The affair was kept a profound secret,
+for she was a member of the congregation to which Michael belonged; and
+Mr. Shipton, for trade reasons, was anxious that it should not be made
+public.  Michael, as one of the deacons, knew all about it, but Robert
+knew nothing.  The girl left her place before the consequences of her
+crime became public; and Michael had written to the man Cadman, telling
+him he ought to support the child of which he was the father.  When he
+received the answer, a sudden thought struck him.  The last page might be
+used for a purpose, and so he hatched his monstrous scheme, and left the
+paper where he knew that, sooner or later, Robert would see it.
+
+When Michael came home, Robert was not there; a bill-head lay near
+Cadman's note with the brief announcement--
+
+
+"I have left for ever.--Your affectionate son,
+
+      "ROBERT."
+
+
+Michael's first emotion, strange to say, was something like joy.  He had
+succeeded, and Robert was removed from the wiles of the tempter.  But
+when the morning came, he looked again, and he saw the words "for ever,"
+and he realised that his son had gone; that he would never see him any
+more; that perhaps he might have committed self-murder.  His human nature
+got the better of every other nature in him, divine or diabolic, and he
+was distracted.  He could not pray after his wont; he tried, but he had
+no utterance; he felt himself rebellious, blasphemous, impious, and he
+rose from his bedside without a word.  He went out into the street and
+down to the shore, trembling lest he should hear from the first man he
+saw that his son's body had been thrown up on the sand; and then he
+remembered how Robert could swim, and that he would probably hang a stone
+round his neck and be at the bottom of some deep pool.  He could not go
+back; people would ask where his son was, and what could he say?  He had
+murdered him.  He had thought to save him, and he was dead.  He walked
+and walked till he could walk no more, and a great horror came on him--a
+horror of great darkness.  The Eternal Arms were unclasped, and he felt
+himself sinking--into what he knew not.  He could not describe his terror
+to himself.  It was nameless, shapeless, awful, infinite; and all he
+could do was to cry out in agony; the words of the Book, even in this his
+most desperate moment, serving to voice the experience for him--"My God!
+my God! why hast Thou forsaken me?"  It became intolerable, and his brain
+began to turn.  He reflected though, even then, upon the disgrace of
+suicide.  For himself he did not care; for had not God abandoned him? and
+what worse thing could befall him?  But then his good name, and the brand
+of infamy which would be affixed to Robert should he still live!  Could
+he not die so that it might be set down as an accident?  He could swim;
+and although he had not been often in the water of late years, it would
+not be thought extraordinary if on a blazing morning he should bathe.  He
+took off his clothes, and in a moment was in the sea, striking out for
+the river channel and the ebbing tide, which he knew would bear him away
+to the ocean.  He saw nothing, heard nothing, till just as he neared the
+buoy and the fatal eddy was before him, when there escaped from him a
+cry--a scream--a prayer of commitment to Him whom he believed he had so
+loyally served--served with such damnable, such treasonable fidelity--the
+God who had now turned away from him.
+
+But the buoy was not reached.  A hand was on him, firm but soft, grasping
+him by the hair at the back of his neck, which he wore long in Puritanic
+fashion, and the hand held him and he knew no more.  Susan Shipton,
+bathing that morning, had seen a human being in the water nearing the
+point where she herself so nearly lost her life.  Without a moment's
+hesitation she made after him, and was fortunate enough to attract the
+attention of two men in a punt, who followed her.  She came up just in
+time, and with their help Michael was saved.  He was senseless, but after
+a few hours he recovered, and asked his wife, who was standing by his
+bedside, who rescued him.
+
+"Why, it was Susan Shipton.  She was in the water and came after you, and
+then, luckily, there was a boat near at hand."
+
+Susan was on the other side of the bed, and he did not see her.  She bent
+over him and kissed him.
+
+He turned round, and thoughts rushed through his brain with a rapidity
+sufficient to make one short moment a thousand years; but he said
+nothing, and presently, almost for the first time in his life, he broke
+down into sobbing.  He turned away from her and could not look at her.
+
+"You see, Mr. Trevanion," she said smilingly, "just about that very place
+I was nearly drowned myself--I don't know whether you ever heard of
+it--and I hardly ever keep my eyes off it now when I am anywhere near it,
+although I am not afraid of going pretty near after what Robert told me.
+When you want a wash again.--I knew you could swim well, by the way, but
+I didn't know you ever went into the water now--you must give the buoy a
+wider berth."  She stooped down and whispered to him--"I never told a
+soul before, but it was Robert who saved me.  We are quits now.  Robert
+saved me, and I have done something to save you, though not so much as
+Robert, because he had no boat."  Then she kissed his forehead again,
+delighted at the thought that she could put something into the balance
+against her lover's heroism.  How proud he would be of her!  She would be
+able, moreover, to stand up a little bit against him.  It was very
+pleasant to her to think she owed so much to him, but she liked also to
+think that she had something of her own.
+
+Michael caught hold of her round the neck, embracing her with a
+passionate fervour which she supposed to be gratitude, but it was not
+altogether that.
+
+"Do you know where Robert has gone?" she said.  "He was not at home last
+night."
+
+"He has gone on--on--some business.  I must go too."
+
+"You cannot go just yet; not till you have got over the shock."
+
+"I can--I can.  Leave me, and I will dress myself.  It is important
+business, and I must see him.  But, Susan, here--I want you."
+
+It was the first time he had ever called her Susan.  She came back to
+him.  "Listen!" he cried.  She bent her head down, but he was silent.  At
+last, with his arms again around her, he said, "My child, my child, my
+child!"
+
+"Me!" she answered innocently.  "Do you mean me? do you really?  I
+couldn't think what you wanted to say, but that's enough.  My dearest,
+dearest father!  Oh, how happy Robert will be! and so am I.  We thought
+you didn't care for me; and I know I am a poor, foolish girl, not half
+good enough for Robert; but I _do_ love him, and I never loved anybody
+else; and I _do_ love you."
+
+When she had left, Michael rose from his bed.  His faith remained
+unchanged, but it presented itself to him in a different shape.  A new
+and hitherto unnoticed article in his creed forced itself before him.
+God's hand--for it _was_ God's hand--had plucked him out of the sea and
+brought him back to life.  What did that mean?  Ah! what was he?--a worm
+of the earth!  How dare he lift himself up against the Almighty's
+designs?  The Almighty asked him the question eternally repeated to us,
+which He had asked thousands of years ago, "Where wast thou when I laid
+the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. . . .
+Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings forward to the
+south?"  "The hawk flies not by my wisdom," murmured Michael to himself,
+"nor doth the eagle at my command make her nest on high.  Ah, it is by
+His wisdom and at His command; how should I dare to interfere?  I see
+it--I see it all now.  'I have uttered that I understood not; things too
+wonderful for me, which I knew not.'"  After his fashion and through his
+religion he had said to himself the last word which can be uttered by
+man.  He knelt down and prayed, and although he was much given to
+extempore prayer, he did not, in this his most intense moment, go beyond
+the prayer of our Lord, which, moreover, expressed what he wanted better
+than any words of his own.  "_Thy will_," he repeated, "_Thy_ will."  His
+one thought now was his son, but he knew not where to find him.  He went
+out and he saw his man, David Trevenna.
+
+"He was off in a hurry; only just caught the coach," said David.
+
+"Who?  What coach?"
+
+"Why, Robert; going to Plymouth."
+
+Michael did not answer, but hurried to his stable where his little pony
+was kept, and put him in the light cart.  He told his wife that he had
+some business in Plymouth with Robert, packed up a few things, took some
+money, and in a few minutes was on the Truro road.  At Truro he found the
+mail, and within twelve hours he was at Plymouth.  Dismounting, he asked
+eagerly if they had a young man at the inn who had come from Cornwall the
+day before.
+
+"What, one as is waiting for the packet?"
+
+"Yes," said Michael at a venture.
+
+"Yes, he's here, but he isn't in just now.  Gone out for a walk."
+
+The one point in Plymouth to which everybody naturally turns is the Hoe,
+and thither Michael went.  It was morning in early autumn or late summer,
+and the whole Sound lay spread out under the sun in perfect peace.  The
+woods of Mount Edgecumbe were almost black in the intense light, and far
+away in the distance, for the air was clear, a sharp eye might just
+discern the Eddystone, the merest speck, rising above the water.  It was
+a wonderful scene, but Michael saw nothing of it.  When he came out of
+the street which leads up from the town to the Hoe, he looked round as a
+man might look for escape if a devouring fire were behind him, and he saw
+his son a hundred yards in front of him gazing over the sea.  With a cry
+of thanks to his God Michael rushed forward, and just as Robert turned
+round caught him in his arms, but could not speak.
+
+At last he found a few words.
+
+"It is all a mistake, Robert--it is all wrong.  Susan is yours--she is
+mine.  Come back with me."
+
+Robert, as much moved as his father, fell on his neck as if he had been a
+woman, and then led him gently down the slope, away from curious persons
+who had watched this remarkable greeting, and took Michael to be some
+strange person who had accidentally met his child or a relative after
+long separation.
+
+"Foreigners, most likely; that's their way.  It looks odd to English
+people," remarked a lady to her daughter.  It did look odd, and would
+have looked odd to most of us--to us who belong to a generation which
+sees in the relationship between father and son nothing more than in that
+between the most casual acquaintances with the disadvantage of inequality
+of age, a generation to whom the father is--often excusably--a person to
+be touched twice a day with the tips of the fingers, a postponement of a
+full share in the business, a person to be treated with--respect?  Good
+gracious!  If it were not bad form, it would be a joke worth playing to
+slip the chair away from the old man as he is going to sit down, and see
+him sprawl on the floor.  Why, in the name of heaven, does he come up to
+the City every day?  He ought to retire, and leave that expensive place
+at Clapham, and take a cottage in some cheap part, somewhere in
+Cambridgeshire or Essex.
+
+"Robert," said Michael, "I have sinned, although it was for the Lord's
+sake, and He has rebuked me.  I thought to take upon myself His direction
+of His affairs; but He is wiser than I.  I believed I was sure of His
+will, but I was mistaken.  He knows that what I did, I did for love of
+your soul, my child; but I was grievously wrong."
+
+The father humbled himself before the son, but in his humiliation became
+majestic, and in after years, when he was dead and gone, there was no
+scene in the long intercourse with him which lived with a brighter and
+fairer light in the son's memory.
+
+"You know nothing then against Susan?"
+
+"Nothing!"
+
+"I found a bit of a letter on your desk from Cadman.  I could not help
+reading it.  Had that anything to do with her?"
+
+"Nothing!"
+
+"Father, you seem faint and you tremble; hadn't you better go in doors
+and take something, and lie down?  We cannot get home till to-morrow."
+
+The father went to the inn with difficulty; he had tasted no food for
+many hours, and had not slept for some time, but he could neither eat nor
+sleep.  Hitherto God's will had appeared to him ascertainable with
+comparative ease, and he had been as certain of the Divine direction as
+if he had seen a finger-post or heard the word in his ear.  But now he
+was dazed and, in doubt.  He was convinced that his rescue by Susan was
+an interposition of Providence, and if so, then all his former
+conclusions were wrong.  What was he to do?  How was he henceforth to
+know the mind of his Master?  Oh, how he wished he had lived in the days
+when the oracle was not darkened--in the days of Moses, when God spake
+from the Mount, when there was the continual burnt-offering at the door
+of the tabernacle, "where I will meet you, to speak there unto thee."
+God really did intend that Robert should marry Susan!  "If righteousness
+and judgment," he cried, inverting the Psalm, "are the habitation of His
+throne, clouds and darkness are round about Him." But he submitted.
+"Thou art wiser than I," he prayed.  It was mere presumption then to have
+risked the loss of his soul in the blind belief that it was for God's
+cause.  The sin had been committed, the lie had been uttered; would God
+pardon him?  and it was mercifully whispered to him that he was forgiven
+for His sake.  So was he saved from uttermost despair.
+
+In the evening he said he would go out and breathe a little fresh air
+before bedtime.  It was a perfectly unsullied night, with no moon, but
+with brilliant stars.  Father and son sat upon a bench facing the sea,
+and the lighthouse from the rock sent its bright beam across the water.
+There is consolation and hope in those vivid rays.  They speak of
+something superior to the darkness or storm--something which has been
+raised by human intelligence and human effort.
+
+Robert turned round to his father.
+
+"Look at the light, father, fourteen miles away."
+
+But his father did not see any light, or, if he did, it was not the
+Eddystone light--he was dead!
+
+Robert never revealed his father's secret to a soul--not even to Susan.
+Nobody but Robert ever knew the reason for the journey to Plymouth.  His
+interpretation of God's designs turned out to be nearer the truth than
+that of his father; for Susan, the worldling, as Michael thought her to
+be, became a devoted wife, and made Robert a happy husband to the end of
+his days.
+
+
+Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson and Co.
+Edinburgh and London.
+
+
+
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