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pression than many newspaper references to Blue-books will give him.

Round the church is the old churchyard, which lies several feet above the level of the roads. The oldest inhabitant is said to recall the time when churchyard and roads were level with each other, and it is believed that the burying-ground has been raised to its present height by many years of use. The promoters of this theory do not seem to have perceived the necessary corollary that the church must have floated up on the rising wave of ground.

A new cemetery has been secured and consecrated in recent years, and is beginning to lose the desolate look which an uninhabited burying-place presents. Far away from the other graves, in a lonely corner, in hope of resurrection to a happier life than this world offered, lie the mortal remains of one who in his lifetime lived most unhappily with his wife. Long time he endured, till he could endure no more. One anniversary of the wedding day the wife was from home. On returning she found an empty house and a brief letter: "If you want me, look in the well." The widow married again, and lives some considerable distance away; but from time to time she revisits the old home, and professes herself happy and comfortable.

The memory of another pitiful ending elings to the village. There is a stream which descends from the downs and meanders through the vale till it is lost in the great river. Near its bank runs the main road to and over the hills, and from this road may sometimes be seen in the gloaming the sorrowing ghost of the poor girl who drowned herself for the old sad reason.

The church is small, but pleasantly suggestive of quiet worship and peaceful, holy thoughts. Through the windows great green trees can be seen waving, and through the open doors

come the song of birds, sights and sounds which are to some more beautiful than modern stained glass and the florid anthems patiently endured by tolerant congregations. There is a large memorial tablet inscribed with the names of the members of a family which lived long in the parish, and with the dates of their births and deaths. Most of the writing is undecipherable through age, but a few of the more modern additions can still be read. The last survivor passed to his rest not long ago. Shortly before his death he revisited the home of his childhood, and went once more to the old church where he and his forefathers had worshipped. He was blind and unable to see the great tablet over the organ, but in answer to his request a ladder was fetched and he climbed up and traced the names with his finger. "Ah," he said at last, "there is room for me," and so went his way. A few months later the list was completed.

A stranger would, perhaps, remark that more perfect cleanliness and tidiness might possibly be achieved by a more liberal application of toil and soap. Inquiries on this point received a sufficiently silencing answer. The caretaker is a woman of business instincts. The pay in a poor village is necessarily small. When she is criticised, "I cleans according to my pay," she replies, and the argument is closed. One can only think with longing of a certain urban parish where a bachelor vicar reigned supreme. As sometimes happens under these circumstances, there was an enthusiastic band of lady helpers in the parish. Did the vicar quail as other vicars have quailed? No; he was a brave man and a wise one, and he utilized the devout enthusiasm by enrolling a corps of voluntary church-cleaners. His church was a model of shining cleanliness.

The Sunday services are in striking

contrast to those to which the clerical sojourner is accustomed in London. The parson stands facing the congregation, and he and they render the service heartily, with the clerk echoing deeply from the west end and the choir helping lustily in the chancel behind. The choir attracted the stranger's notice, and he made inquiries concerning some of the boys. "Oh, yes, that lad in gray whom you ask about can sing quite nicely, only he can't read; and the boy next to him can read but can't sing; and the one on the other side is deaf." Inquiries were prosecuted no further.

In the course of paying a pastoral visit to a dear old cottage-woman of eighty-three the locum tenens made a discovery which threw considerable light upon the vexed question why sermons do or do not please, as the case may be. The conversation turned on health, and incidentally the old lady remarked, "You're stouter than the vicar, are you not, sir?" The visitor disguised his real sentiments as well as he could, and she proceeded, “I was talking to a neighbor the other day, and she said, 'Mr. does look nice in the pulpit; he seems to fill it so." Tempora mutantur; her father-it must be nearly a century ago-used to pay rent for land at the rate of 41. per acre. He was one of the pioneers who introduced agricultural machinery, and was the proud possessor of nineteen threshing-machines which were worked by horse power. The fate of reformers overtook him, and his machines were broken up by misguided laborers. The blow was a heavy one to the farmer, and he never got over the disaster. It was strange to sit and listen to his daughter telling of those days which one generally looks upon as almost mediæval, and yet were all but within her own memory.

In just such a cottage as hers, and not far off, lives the oldest inhabitant

of the village. A year ago he felt that the burden of age was becoming too heavy to be borne, and took to his bed in quiet expectation of the end. But Death chooses his own time, and the old man regained health. He kept thenceforward, however, almost entirely to his bed, varying the day only by an occasional hour at the window which looks into his garden and along the village street. The room which he occupies is spotlessly clean, is light and airy, and is kept cool in summer and warm in winter by the thick thatch which hangs like a shaggy eyebrow over the little window. Occasionally the clergyman visits him, and the old man will ask for passage after passage of the Bible, passages which he knows by heart and loves well, to be read to him. To him the sacred pages are an unspeakable comfort, and he waits and waits in calm confidence and sure faith.

The visitor, as he listens to him or lets his eyes wander round the room with its white walls relieved by homely texts, thinks of another sick-room which he used to visit in a London back street, endeavoring to carry help and comfort to a dying man. The street was mean and ugly and noisy, the house was filthy and offensive with the sickening, pungent smell of vermin and ill-health. The walls were alive; the sick man was tormented by the flies which crept over his face and into his eyes. He received the clergyman's ministrations without zeal and without resentment, indifferently. He awaited death without much hope and without fear. Well, God is the Judge and will know where to lay the blame for the dirt and ignorance of a forgotten corner of a densely populated parish, where an overworked vicar had tried in vain to minister to too many thousands of souls till one of the colleges established a church and mission in the most neglected district. Perhaps

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"the system" is at fault in this case, as "the system" is at fault in several other matters where no individual is ever found to be blameworthy.

A stranger from London visiting the country is, of course, struck at every turn by the contrasts between the great city and the little village, between the boundless desert of buildings with its few oases and the scattered groups of houses set in the farstretching lands and overshadowed by the mighty sky. Out of the multitude of differences a few impress themselves sharply on the mind; all the rest soon get taken for granted. In London one's sleep is broken by the clatter of horses' hoofs and the rattle of wheels; in the country it is broken by dogs, poultry, and birds. In London it is the roads that outrage one's nose; in the country it is the pigsty. These things one accepts without surprise. It is a law of nature that perfect quiet and perfect sweetness should be unattainable outside a hermitage. Two things, however, are a continual source of surprise and interest to the present writer in his temporary exilenamely, the strength of parish feeling and the low rate of wages. Compared with these things the rest sink into insignificance.

What does it matter to the man of towns what parish he lives in-except when the rate-collector leaves a demand-note? How many Londoners could tell you at what point or in what street they crossed the parish boundary? But in the country how different! There the parish is a living and distinct unit. To be a parishioner is in itself an appeal to patriotism, to think of another parish or to mention it is to rouse latent hostility. This may be due to the mere elementary fact of distance, and to the necessity of walk. ing a long way if you would reach another parish; but if so, the effects seem out of proportion to the cause. It is

conceivable that the laws relating to attendance at parish churches might be revived in this twentieth century with the approval of the country; it is a fact that church rates are actually made there still by vestry meetingsmade? ay, and paid. Could parish feeling further go?

In London the solitary authentic relic of local patriotism is to be found among bands of youths who fight with belts for the honor of their district against other bands from other districts. Perhaps a trace of the same feeling may be discovered in the desire for marriage and christening in the parish church under whose shadow the family lived for years, or even generations, till improvement schemes broke up the colony. A student of sociology would be surprised were he to search the registers of such a church as St. Giles-in-the-Fields and note the abodes of those whose names appear in their columns.

And the wages. The lowest weekly sum earned by a full-grown man in regular employment in London within the experience of the present writer was nineteen shillings a week, earned by a railway porter at a great railway terminus in a position beyond the reach of the tipping passenger. He had a wife and two children to support and six shillings weekly rent to pay.

As

a rule, a pound a week was considered in that district to be the standard wage for unskilled labor. In Central London the rate of wages is fifty per cent. higher, but rents are higher too. In Berkshire an agricultural laborer earns eleven shillings a week. True, he pays little or no rent for his cottage, and he usually has a little garden from which he supplies himself with vegetables, but-eleven shillings! a wife, four or five children, boots, clothes, luxuries, tobacco, doctors, oil, fuel (with the summer price of coal standing at one and sevenpence the hundred

weight) burials, and-eleven shillings! Years ago tea cost five shillings a pound, sugar cost eightpence, corn fetched fifty or sixty shillings a quarter, and the laborer's wage was then as now eleven shillings. Doubtless he thanks God that with the advent of Free Trade and owing to various causes beyond his knowledge prices have fallen, and that he now lives in luxury uponeleven shillings.

It is said, by way of mitigation, that he gets Michaelmas money and harvest money. Perhaps the Berkshire laborer enjoys a different kind of human nature from the rest of us, never indulges in a harvest festival outside the church, but spreads out the money received at these special times over the rest of the year, like a little butter spread over a large slice of bread. It is also urged that he is fond of living on bread and bacon-in fact, that he likes his bacon fat and full flavored. Possibly "Spartan sauce" makes it palatable.

One thing at least shall be set down here to his credit. The writer, moving among the people for a short time, was begged from only once. The one beggar was a stranger from another parish. A month does not permit sufficient experience to justify generalizations, but what clergyman ever worked for a month in London without receiving endless tales of want and woe?

No sketch of the village would be complete without a passing reference to Don, who lies outside the study door waiting for any sound which can be construed into an intention to take a walk. Don is the vicarage dog. His head recalls mastiffs, his hind legs are associated with St. Bernards; it would require an expert to interpret the rest of him. Suffice it to say that whatever races are represented in his big body are represented only by their virtues. Don has but one weakness, an insatiable appetite for hard exercise. You

take him for a gentle stroll after breakfast, and all the rest of the morning he lies in wait for you. Is the door opened by the maid who brings in the letters? In comes Don, with a tail that clears the room, to fetch you out, departing reproachfully when you explain that next Sunday's sermon will not brook these interruptions. You come from your lunch intending to steal forty winks over the newspaper, but Don is too much for you. Whack! Whack! Whack! goes his great tail from side to side of the hall, and his big brown eyes, from which all their habitual sadness is for once banished, beam at you till you yield feebly. Don casts a hasty glance in passing at the cat enjoying her frugal meal; two long red licks-the plate is empty, and Don is half-way down the drive before pussy has completed her opening remarks. Down the village street he takes you, past thatched cottages, past cottages with red tiles, past cottages now beginning to appear with slate roofs, past cottages, horribile visu, which have their outlying portions covered with galvanized iron, past the inn from which two friends, a St. Bernard and a retriever, run out to play (but Don says coldly, "Go away, can't you see I've got a man to look after?"), and so far away over the downs or through the vale. Flop, flop, flop, go the great paws, eating up the miles; splash, splash, into every stream that we cross; longing eyes are fixed on the sheep in the meadow; who so happy in the three kingdoms as Don?

And he is shrewd, too. Get your bicycle half an hour before lunch and he will join you. He knows perfectly well that you are going only to the market town. Get your bicycle in the early afternoon, and Don looks at you wisely. If you get out both bicycles he will accompany you, for he knows that his mistress will accommodate her pace to that of a heavily built dog who

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Bearded, bowed, with hard blue eyes that questioned always, so we knew David Uyo as children; an old, remotely quiet man, who was to be passed on the other side of the street and in silence. I have wondered sometimes if the old man ever noticed the hush that ran before him and the clamor that grew up behind, the games that held breath while he went by, and the children that judged him with wide eyes. He alone, of all the people in the little dorp, made his own world and possessed it in solitude; about him, the folk held all interest in community and measured life by a trivial common standard. At his doorstep, though, lay the frontier of little things; he was something beyond us all, and therefore greater or less than we. The mere pictorial value of his tall figure, the dignity of his long, forked beard, and the expectancy of his patient eye, must have settled it that he was greater. I was a child when he died, and remember only what I saw, but the rest was talk, and so, perhaps, grew the more upon me.

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walking well and striding long, with the gait of one that has good news, and he smiled at those he passed and nodded to them, unheeding or not seeing their strong surprise nor the alarm he wrought to the children. He went straight to his little house, that overlooks a crowded garden and a pool of the dorp spruit, entered, and was seen no more alive. His servant, a sullen Kaffir, found him in his bed when supper-time came, called him, looked, made sure, and ran off to spread the news that David Uyo was dead. He was lying, I have learned, as one would lie who wished to die formally, with a smile on his face and his arms duly crossed. This is copiously confirmed by many women who crowded, after the manner of Boers, to see the corpse; and of all connected with him, I think, his end and the studied manner of it, implying an ultimate deference to the conventions, have most to do with the awe in which his memory is preserved.

Now, a death so well conceived, so aptly preluded, must, in the nature of things, crown and complete a life of singular and strong quality. A murder without a good motive is merely folly; properly actuated, it is tragedy, and therefore of worth. So with a death: one seldom dies well, in the technical sense, without having lived well, in the artistic sense; and a man who will

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