without him. Fold and farm are needing the master's eye and hand, and it will be a poor lambing season for us, I think, wanting Steve; and deary me, Charlotte, one word from you would bring him home!"

Charlotte stooped and lifted the tortoise-shell cat, lying on the rug at her feet. She was not fond of cats, and she was only attentive to puss as the best means of hiding her blushes. Ducie understood the small, womanly ruse, and waited no other answer. "What is the matter with the squire, Charlotte? Does he think that Stephen isn't good enough for you? I'll not say that Latrigg evens Sandal in all things, but I will say that there are very few families that can even Latrigg. We have been without reproach -good women, honest men; not afraid of any face of clay, though it wore a crown above it."

"Dear Ducie, there is no question at all of that. The trouble arose about Julius Sandal. Father was determined that I or Sophia should marry him, and he was afraid of Steve standing in the way of Julius. As for myself, I felt as if Julius had been invited to Seat-Sandal that he might make his choice of us, and I took good care that he should understand from the first hour that I was not on his approbation. I resented the position, and I did not intend Stephen to feel that he was only getting a girl who had been appraised by Julius Sandal, and declined."

"You are a good girl, Charlotte, and as for Steve standing in the way of Julius Sandal, he will, perhaps, do that, and to some more purpose than sweethearting. I hear tell that he is very rich-but Steve is not poor-no, not by a good deal. His grandfather and I have been saving for him for more than twenty years, and Steve is one to turn his penny well and often. If you marry Steve, you will not have to study about money matters." "Poor or rich, I shall marry Steve if he is true to me."

"There is another thing, Charlotte, a thing I talk about to no one; but we will speak of it once and forever. Have you heard a word about Steve's father? My trouble is long dead and buried, but there are some that will open the grave itself for a mouthful of scandal. What have you heard? Don't be afraid to speak out." "I heard that you ran away with Steve's father."

"Yes, I did."

"That your father and mother opposed your marriage." "Yes, that also is true."

"That he was a handsome lad, called Matt Pattison, your father's head shepherd."

"Was that all?"

"That it killed your mother."

"No, that is untrue. Mother died from an inflammation brought on by taking cold. I was no ways to blame for her death. I was to blame for running away from my home and duty, and I took in full all the sorrowful wage I earned. Steve's father did not live to see his son, and when I heard of mother's death, I determined to go back to father, and stay with him always if he would let me. I got to Sandal village in the

evening, and stayed with Nancy Bell all night. In the morning I went up the fell; it was a wet, cold morning, with gusts of wind driving the showers like a solid sheet eastward. We had a hard fight up the breast of the mountain, and the house looked bleak and desolate, for the men were all in the barn threshing, and the women in the kitchen at the butter troughs. I stood in the porch to catch my breath and take my plaid from around the child, and I heard father, in a loud, solemn voice, saying the Collect-father always spoke in that way when he was saying the Confession or the Collect and I knew very well that he would be standing at that east window, with his prayer-book open on the sill. So I waited until I heard the Amen,' and then I lifted the latch and went in. He turned around and faced me, and his eyes fell at once upon little Steve, who was a bonny lad then, more than three years old. 'I have come back to you, father,' i said, 'I and my little Steve.' 'Where is thy husband?' he asked. I said, he is in the grave; I did wrong, and I am sorry, father.'"

"Then I forgive thee.' That was all he said. His eyes were fixed upon Steve, for he never had a son of his own, and he held out his hands and Steve went straight to him, and he lifted the boy, and kissed him again and again, and from that moment he loved him with all his soul. He never cast up to me the wrong I had done, and by and by I told him all that had happened to me, and we never more had a secret between us, but worked together for one end, and what that end was, some day you may find out. I wish you would write a word or two to Steve. word would bring him home, dear."

A

"But I cannot write it, Ducie. I promised father there should be no love-making between us, and I would not break a word father trusts in. Besides, Stephen is too proud and too honourable to have any underhand courting. When he can walk in and out Seat-Sandal in dayshine and in dark, and as everyone's equal, he will come to see me. Until then, we can trust each other and wait."

"What does the squire think of Steve's plans? Maybe, now, they are not very pleasant to him. I remember at the sheepshearing he did not say very much."

"He did not say very much because he never thought that Steve was in earnest. Father does not like changes, and you know how land-owners regard traders, and I'm sure you wouldn't even one of our shepherd-lads with a man that minds a loom, and I would far rather see Steve counting his flocks on the fells than his spinning-jennys in a mill. Father was troubled about the railway coming to Ambleside, and I do think a factory in SandalSide would make him heart-sick."

"Then Steve shall never build one while Sandal lives. Do you think I would have the squire made heart-sick if I could make him heart-whole? Not for all the woollen yarn in Englandtell him Ducie said so the squire and I are old, old friends. Why, we pulled primroses together in the very meadow Steve

thought of building in! I'm not the woman to put a mill before a friend; oh, no! And in the long end I think you are right, Charlotte. A man had better work among sheep than among human beings. They are a deal more peaceable and easy to get on with. It is not so very hard for a shepherd to be a good man.” "You speak as I like to hear you, Ducie; but I must be going, for a deal falls to my oversight now."

Then she went slowly home, Ducie walking to the pine-wood with her. There was a vague unrest and fear at her heart, she knew not why.

Sophia's ideas of her own importance grew constantly more pronounced; indeed, there was a certain amount of "claim" in them, which no one liked very well to submit to.

Everyone was worn out before July, and everyone felt it to be a relief when the wedding-day came. It was ushered in with the chiming of bells and the singing of bride-songs by the village children. The village itself was turned upside down, and the house inside out. As for the gloomy old church, it looked like a festal place, with flowers, and gay clothing and smiling faces. And among the maids in pink and blue and primrose, Sophia stood, a very lily of womanhood.

The service was followed by the conventional wedding-breakfast, the congratulations of friends, and the rattling away of the bridal-carriage to the "hurrahing" of the servants and the villagers, and the tintinnabula of the wedding-peals. Before four o'clock the last guest had departed, and the squire stood with his wife and Charlotte, weary and disconsolate amid the remains of the feast and the dying flowers, all of them distinctly sensitive to that mournful air which accomplished pleasures leave behind them.

The squire could say nothing to dispel it. He took his rod as an excuse for solitude, and went off to the fells. Mrs. Sandal was exhausted, and was easily persuaded to go to her room and sleep. Then Charlotte called the servants, men and women, and removed every trace of the ceremony, and all that was unusual or extrav agant. She set the simplest of meals; she managed in some way, without a word, to give the worried squire the assurance that all the folly and waste and hurryment were over forever, and that his life was to fall back into a calm, regular, economical groove. He drank his tea and smoked his pipe to this sense, and was happier than he had been for many a week.

"It is a middling good thing, Alice," he said, "that we have only one more daughter to marry. I should think a matter of three or four would ruin or kill a man, let alone a mother.

"Come day, go day; at the long end, life is no better than the preacher called it-vanity. Well, well, William Sandal! Maybe we will feel better after a night's sleep. To-morrow is untouched."

And the squire, looking into her pale, placid face, had not the heart to speak out his thought, which was, "Nay, nay; we have mortgaged to-morrow. Debt and fear, and the penalties of overwork and over-eating and over-feeling will be dogging us for their dues by dayshine."

THE SCIENCE OF PREACHING.

BY ARCHDEACON F. W. FARRAR.

Ir is with considerable hesitation that I sit down to write on the subject of preaching. I am very far indeed from regarding myself as an authority on the subject. To preach aright has always seemed to me a serious problem, and to preach at all involves an immense responsibility. If there are any who can contemplate the duty with a light heart, I am not one of them. To see before you the faces of hundreds, sometimes even of thousands, of men and women; to know that some of them at least are hungering and thirsting after righteousness; to know that the multitude is composed of men, women, and the youth of both sexes, and that the word spoken may prove to be for some of them a message from God and the turning-point of a life; to know something of the struggles, the doubts, the difficulties, the temptations, the deadly perils, by which they are variously beset to fear lest we should incur the reproach due to those whose

"Lean and flashy songs

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;

The hungry sheep look up and are not fed,

But, swoll'n with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread."

All this is, to a serious man, a very serious matter. "When I walk up the aisle of Westminster Abbey," said Canon Kingsley to a friend, "and see those gathered thousands, I wish myself dead, and when I walk back again after the sermon, I wish myself more dead."

Sermons are, and for the last two centuries have been, a common butt for the scorn of wits and men of the world. I attribute this, in part, to the depth of inanity, dulness, and artificiality to which, with a few brilliant exceptions, they fell at the Restoration, and throughout the eighteenth century. I do not think it would be fair to say that the general run of average preaching in these days is at all contemptible. I hear many sermons, preached by curates and by clergymen entirely unknown, and am constantly struck with the fact that if there be in one's self the least trace of "meek heart and due reverence," the sermons are few, indeed, which may not produce, at least, their passing and infinitesimal effect for good. It is true that many sermons-one's own and others-are trite, feeble, commonplace; it cannot possibly be otherwise. There are twenty thousand clergy in the English Church, and many of us are very ordinary and everyday persons, who have not the faintest pretence to profoundness or eloquence. But then, we share these limitations of faculty with our lay critics. We find the tedious and the platitudinous quite as much in books, newspapers, law courts, Parliamentary debates, and magazines, as in sermons. Sermons would be just as bad if you turned out all the clergy to-morrow and put twenty thousand of their most disdainful and selfsatisfied critics in their place. The clergy possess no monopoly of dulness or patent of unprofitableness. If very few of us are great, or wise, or clever,

we, at least, stand intellectually on a level with the mass of our hearers. To most men God does not give ten talents, but only one, and that only in an earthen vessel. It is impossible to expect an endless succession of "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn," from a preacher whose powers, at the best, are but ordinary; who may be suffering at any moment from sickness of body or depression of spirits; who is, in very many instances, involved in endless work and unceasing worry; whose heart may be aching with anxiety, and whose life may be burdened by poverty and all the sordid cares which it inevitably brings. And when we remember that most clergymen, in the midst of heavy parochial burdens, have to produce-not rare and splendid conferences at Advent or Easter, like some of the great French preachers-but two sermons, or more, regularly every week, besides various addresses, we shall, I think, be struck with the general excellence of sermons; at any rate we shall be less impatient of their many defects.

"The worst speak something good; if all want sense,

God takes a text, and preacheth patience."

There are, I frankly admit, some sermons which are simply detestable. When the preacher is conceited, affected, and manifestly unreal; when he betrays his ignorance, while he is pretending to a knowledge and authority which he does not possess; when he is insinuating some disputed and paltry party dogma, instead of pressing home the great, broad, simple truths of the Gospel; when he is indulging in "loud-lunged antiBabylonianisms," instead of "preaching simple Christ to simple men ; when he is abusing the coward's castle of his pulpit to slander his betters, and to teach the sham science of castes, and the sham theology of cliques, or to air the cut and dried snippings of the formule with which he has been assiduously crammed at his party training place; when he is doing anything but

all hearers are free to turn their thoughts to something else, with such charity for the preacher as they may. But so long as he is evidently and transparently sincere; so long as he confines himself to preaching the plain eternal truths of the Gospel of Christ; so long as he insists on the fundamental and primary truth, that "what that supreme and sacred Majesty requires of us is innocence alone," I think that the most critical of hearers ought to bear with his limitations of power, or his ineradicable defects of manner and style. After all, the lowest claim which any sermon could put forward, would be a claim to rhetorical skill, or literary finish. If a sermon attempts to charm the ear or the mind, it should only be as a means of moving the heart. Moral and spiritual edification is the humble, yet lofty aim of every true Christian pulpit. It is, as St. Augustine said, docere, flectere, morere-to arrest the careless, to strengthen the weak, to lift up the fallen, to bring the wanderer home.

This is the deeper aspect of preaching, and a clergyman must, indeed, have been indifferent or unfortunate if, during his ministry, abundant proofs have not come to him that even the ministrations which he himself,