divine as theology itself. Also, he was straining his powers to keep up with the philosophical and scientific literature of the day; to know what men said, and did, and thought in that world of letters which he loved, but which, it seemed to him, was to the people of St. Peter's foolishness. Over and above all this, there was his parish work; how, then, was he to waste his precious time at parties, listening to?

There his argumentative reasoning came to a sudden stop. Go he could not, and would not. All he could do, he did, which was to soften, to the best of his power, the inevitable refusal. The answer to that note cost him nearly as much trouble as a sermon would have done, and when it was despatched he returned, with a sigh of relief, to his work.

"An insufferable prig!" ejaculated Mr. Smith, when he got his note. "No time to spare from his studies! Well, it's the last time I'll trouble myself about him however.”

“And I," muttered the curate from his cloud, "must get up a choral class somehow. How shall I begin?"

CHAPTER III.-ECLIPSE OF THE LONE STAR.

"I'm afraid it won't do, sir. The old singers won't like to be turned out of their places in the gallery."

"I should like to turn the gallery out as well as the singers," responded Ralph. "But that is a work of time; meanwhile

"Couldn't the new organist teach them as well as the others ?"

The curate repressed an outbreak of impatience, remembering the scared locks of those same old singers upon his pointed canticles, and their amazed repudiation of any knowledge of notes.

"Teach them! Why there is nothing in them to teach. They don't even know the musical alphabet. There is not one of them who could sing up the diatonic scale of C Major, not to speak of the Doric style, and what would they understand about tonal chanting ?"

The old clerk's eyes had opened gradually to their full width during this speech, but when it came to tonal chanting, he gave it up in despair, and let his shoulder drop, with a bleak sort of look at the new instrument.

"It's all very well as far as it goes, but there isn't a man or woman in the whole parish but what misses the good old organ. Talk of sound! there was as much in one of those pipes as there is in this thing's whole body. But it's all the same, for that matter, be it man or beast; if he's old shove him away, his time's up. Will you bring the keys, sir, or shall I stop to lock the door?"

"No, I am coming. A great shame that there should be any

necessity for locking church doors."

"I remember a time when there was a bass viol, and a fiddle, and a clarinet in that there gallery. I thought a organ was the tip-topper for a church,” said the clerk, with exasperating significance.

When he got no answer, he proceeded to mutter something about the minister at the Ebenezer Chapel being glad enough to have the old singers, if so be they were turned out. It was too much for Ralph's forbearance. The insolent, pseudo- importance of the thing! That these people should absolutely threaten him, their spiritual director, with an Ebenezer Chapel, if he presumed to do or leave undone certain things pleasing or displeasing to them! He turned upon the clerk angrily; he said something to the effect that their going or staying was their own concern, and perfectly immaterial to him; a hasty speech, which he would not have made if he had stopped to think about it, and which, passing through many mouths, reached the subjects of it in the form of an intimation that the curate did not want them at church, and they might go where they liked for anything he cared about them.

Ralph, however, walked on through the churchyard, where there was still so much to be done, and the clerk eyeing him, muttered that it was a pity such a fine figure of a man should be so cranky.

"Sofra-no and al-to, and tenor and bass," said the old man in a sort of crow. "I've remembered 'em all to tell old Atwell. Mean to persuade me he won't pipe up with his cracked whistle-he's years older than me- - in the very middle of 'em? I've seen the time when there was none but him to sing, and no music, at the wake time; and to be sure the length he could keep up without fetching his breath was wonderful. It's over now; smart's the word. And I declare if the old church doesn't look as if it was stretching its sides and yawning; making believe to come out young and fresh again! It won't do, old fellow; no use to come those airs with me, I know better!"

As for the curate, he was confessing to himself that his first choral meeting had not been very successful. Perhaps, however, it was hardly fair to expect immediate snccess; the second would be better. What he could not understand was, how there came to be so little knowledge or appreciation of music amongst the congregation. They seemed not only satisfied with the existing state of affairs, but actually averse to improvement. As to the old singers-if they were so foolish, he could not help it. Such discordant noises must be stopped at any cost.

It never occurred to him, though, that he might have effected the change more quietly, or in a more conciliatory manner. If he wanted something done it was sufficient to give orders, and get it done; more he did not trouble himself with; if people did not like what was proper they ought to like it. It was his business to rule, and theirs to submit. More than this, if he had been told that he was laying up for himself a store of bitterness and enmity in the parish, he would only

have accepted it as a sort of martyrdom, which he must bear unflinchingly in the cause of right.

At the entrance to that court with the ugly name he paused for a moment, and then turned up into it instead of going the front way to his lodgings. There was a cottager he wanted to visit. He did visit his poorer parishioners; but yet on their door steps or in their houses he was like an icicle, which can neither be thawed nor broken off out of the way. Their outpoured complaints met with no response, or else such a one as they could not understand. He knew nothing about them or their wants; in this department of his office he was helpless as a child. He had never studied it; looking upon it indeed as an irksome duty, to be done only because it was a duty. He gave away money, it is true, indiscriminately, unless where he suspected imposition; and for a suspected imposter there was nothing, not even bare toleration. The poor people were mazed at him, not knowing what to make of him. He certainly told them their duty, but it was in some lofty hazy fashion that they could not understand. His money they did understand and appreciate, but even that did not come from him as though he wished it to do them good. He had indeed as much courtesy for the cottager in his own house as he would have had for Lord Wellington in his, but the courtesy was still a sort of iced haughtiness, and there was a feeling which crept even along the cottage hearth that it sprang from the respect he owed to himself as a gentleman, rather than from any consideration for others. Moreover, an uneasy consciousness that something was wanting in his intercourse with these people did but increase the coldness and reserve which they took for pride.

As he reached the door of the cottage he had intended to visit, it opened, and a dirty child toddled out, crying dismally. Within he saw the sick woman with her peevish, muddled face, and her coarse, soiled garments, crouching over the fire on the hearth strewn with white ashes; whilst garments hung to dry fluttered on the chairs, and the table bore the remains of the evening meal. While he took this in, a man with a pipe in his mouth slouched across the kitchen; the woman spoke to him sharply, warding off the pipe, and he looked at her and swore. With a miserable feeling of depression and helplessness the curate turned away. What could he do there if he went in? Nothing; absolutely nothing. The woman would whine and the man scowl, and the dirt and squalor and tobacco smoke sickened him. Not that he would have turned away for that, if there had been any good to do by going in, but in his inmost heart he felt that there was not; at least, that he could do none. So he looked at the big piston with an exasperated feeling that it was always busy and always effecting something, and went back to his room and his books.

There was discomfort in the aspect of that room, with the light

straight through from wall to wall, and the meagre furniture, but he shut his eyes to it, with a scornful self-questioning as to whether it was or was not too good for him. He wanted a place to study in, not a lounge. Want of appreciation had not made him careless over the compilation of those sermons which so few understood, or even heard. They were indeed the one aim and object of his life; he gave to them his best thoughts, and brought to bear upon them his highest powers of reasoning. And yet what could he do in his present position? This was his thought as he stopped for a moment and laid down his pen. He summoned up before him the whole body of his hearers and nonhearers; the whole silent stolid mass of people who sat in their pews for the purpose of listening to him. Which amongst them cared for his preaching or his efforts? Could he find one person in the congregation able to give a trustworthy verdict on the fruit of his brain? And there came into his mind the restless, irritating thought, "If I were in a different position; if I had to speak to brain-workers; if I had scope for my powers-a fair field; then I might do something." But the thought was momentary, though it left its sting behind. The asceticism which made him put away from himself the comforts which other men enjoy innocently, bade him silence these discontented longings with a single stern dogma. After all, if he had but known it, he was self-deceived. He was in fact preaching to himself, not to others. He lived, as it were, in the shadow of his own brain, and the sermons which he prepared for an ordinary mixed congregation, were in reality only the working out, link by link, of the chain of ideas and theories springing up in connection with, or in answer to the great philosophical and scientific writers of the day-thoughts which hovered about some great problem to be solved, or spoke with a tinge of mournful bitterness of life as it must have looked to himself—a state of perpetual warfare against the genial influences around him. Now it was a series of essays on the development of the human mind, touching upon the vexed question of the origin of species; now on the finite nature of human wisdom, and now an intricate argument on the Essayists and Reviewers' school of writing. And if one of the rough-shod and uneducated did chance to listen with all his might, he sat uncomfortably on his seat to hear an elaborate proof of truths which it had never occurred to him to doubt. Clever sermons perhaps, and satisfactory to the preacher, but for any practical use in such a congregation, valueless. And yet the curate was utterly ignorant of the great gulf which lay between his sermons and the capacities of their ostensible listeners. He had brought up before himself the mean old church, with its sea of human faces, fair and plain, intelligent and heavy. And suddenly across the bare platform on which he worked, far beyond them, there came a single spark from a distant fire. One face there was in that

sea which had attracted him; one solitary earnest face, the face of a listener; turned speculatively sometimes towards the pulpit, sometimes away from it, but always in earnest. He smiled at himself for the thought. Was it likely that the delicate, childlike face in that dim corner should be thoughtful with such thoughts as worked in his own brain, or fell from his lips?

The improbability occurred to him, but not his own inconsistency in speaking what to so many must be an unknown language. Involuntarily he thrust away his paper and opened the book nearest to him. It chanced to be the only volume in the room below the hard standard he allowed himself: "Thorndale; or, the Conflict of Opinions." It opened at a part whose dreamy beauty drew him on in spite of himself. What could he have in common with a man like Thorndale, that there should come into his mind a passing pity for him? He read as far as this: "I cannot describe her; I could not see her for the light love threw around her." And then he closed the book with a smile, laying a marker in it-the mark of his disapproval, and superiority to any such weakness.

If the great questions hovering round the solemn mysteries of life and death were to be lost in the sorrows of a pitiful love story, he had done; such things had no interest for him; he taught a sterner creed!

CHAPTER IV.-THE EARNEST LISTENER.

AND still the curate lived up in that brain-cloud of his, seeing nothing in the parish to call him down, except the abortions which his hand swept away remorselessly from the Church or its services. The system of pewlocking was stopped effectually by removing the doors; and he could not help a feeling of grim amusement at the sight of some absent man searching in his pocket for a key, while the seat lay doorless before him.

It is possible that the very nature of the curate's sermons kept the feeling against him in the parish down at the zero of passive dislike, since they were not fault-finding; in fact, they contained nothing that was in any way capable of individual application, so that he provoked no active enmity, only dislike.

By this time it had become a habit with him to turn towards that corner where the childlike face was generally to be seen. He had arrived at a feeling of positive disappointment at its occasional absence; and whereas he had formerly preached to himself alone, he had now a double individuality, and spoke also to that one in the crowd of hearers who seemed to listen and think.

There were, too, a few of his parishioners, less inimical than others, who had joined the newly-established choral class for practice, and