Paason 'e's mixed 'is liquors, and 'e's gone to bed." It was true, and that day the incense failed to rise.

Our old friend delighted in such reminiscences, but his own eccentricities were quite as striking in their way. The service at his church was, when we first knew it, of the most primitive order. There was a high reading-desk, with a higher pulpit, and a niche for the clerk below all; vestry there was none, and the Parson, who always preached in a black gown, stripped off his surplice in full sight of his flock and hung it over the altar-rail, making a striking appearance for a moment in broadcloth, before donning the garment of, as he conceived it, orthodox sable stuff. At that time, the musical accompaniment was provided by a small harmonium; but within his own memory the service had been assisted by almost as many instruments as summoned the Babylonians to the worship of Nebuchadnezzar's golden image; in fact he still preserved in the Vicarage an old violoncello, made of sheet iron instead of wood, which used to be played in the ecclesiastical orchestra. One day, greatly daring, the choir were performing "Lift up your heads, oh ye gates," from THE MESSIAH, and the man with the 'cello considered his part not sufficiently prominent, being a musician who was determined to play his instrument as though it were the only one in the universe; and so it came to pass that in one of the silent pauses after the words "Who is the King of Glory?" a hoarse voice was heard growling, "Pass I over the rozzum, Varmer Bull, and I'll soon show 'em who the King of Glory is!" But afterwards the Parson's daughters grew up, and took music seriously, and the church was restored, and a choir formed; which on one occasion gave rise to a scene that caused smiles on

more than one countenance. The usual list with the numbers of the hymns, chants, and so forth, had been prepared by the young organist and placed in the choir-seats and of course in the reading-desk. The first hymn was always sung after the third collect. As the Parson gave out the number from his paper, there was a warning cough from the other side of the church where the organ was situated, a head was shaken, and a pair of lips strove to contort themselves into speech without words. The Parson again consulted his paper; the organist played over the tune she desired; the same number for the hymn was announced; but as the organist stuck to her guns, the congregation were hopelessly puzzled, except such of them as happened to sit near enough to the choir to gain the necessary information. Before the sermon the same disastrous muddle was repeated point for point; and the Parson flushed indignantly, as though he felt that he was being publicly flouted by his own flesh and blood. After the sermon, when all were waiting expectantly to see what would come of the announcement of the third and last hymn, he said in a tone which, though meant for his own edification only, was distinctly audible to most of those present: "No, you've put me wrong twice, and I sha'n't give out any more."

He never considered it irreverent to address any of his flock by name, or make some remark about him in his hearing, as he was either entering the church or leaving it. Once, as one of his best-known parishioners was making his way up the aisle, we all heard him say: "Ah, here comes Harry Farmer, and he's got a new hat; very good hat it is too, Harry, and looks uncommon well."

But with all this remarkable behaviour, he exercised a strong personal

influence over all those with whom he came in contact; and it is not to be questioned that his parishioners were the best conducted villagers in the neighbourhood. If any man was a quarrelsome neighbour, given to drink or small dishonesty, the Parson would call upon him and talk to him in a strain such as few offenders could endure. He would tell a man for instance : "If you get drunk you sha'n't stop in this parish; we don't want any drunken men here, and we won't have them." Whether influence was brought to bear on the culprit's landlord or not, we cannot say, but it is the fact that such folk either reformed themselves up to the level of their neighbours or else shifted their quarters. Upon occasion he would not scruple to use the ignorance of the evil-doer as a means for strengthening his warnings and rebukes; as when he told one such: "Now, mind, if this sort of thing goes on, you'll be brought up before me next Bench-day, and I sha'n't spare you because you belong to my own parish; and if that doesn't do you any good you'll be sent to the Quarter Sessions; and if they can't reform you, the Assizes will have a turn at you; and then if you don't mind what you're about, you'll

be handed over to the Barons of the Exchequer!" To such a man it would have seemed less risk to walk willingly into Tophet than to disregard such a warning so delivered.

Naturally, he did not live his life without earning the hard opinions of many; but those who blamed him were those whose personal knowledge of him was wilfully or accidentally limited. He died as he had lived, beloved by every soul in his parish, and the grief caused by the event spread far beyond its narrow boundary. To those who knew him there, the country-side can never be the same again. We shall miss beyond recovery his love for truth, his blunt condemnation of shams, his law-abiding honesty ; qualities which he was wont to inculcate no less plainly and impressively from the pulpit than in his daily life. take no shame to say of him, as was said of another who won far wider renown, that he was a man

We

Whose life was work, whose language rife

With rugged maxims hewn from life;
Who never spoke against a foe;
Whose eighty winters freeze with one
rebuke

All great self-seekers trampling on the right.

Peace to his soul!

THE air was very still and laden with the perfume of innumerable flowers in the straight downpour of sunshine. The steaming sweetness of the earth rose in a vapour of light and heat, and the pungent scent of bloom fading in the sun, an infinity of light and colour, of hot heavy fragrance and ceaseless shining, of all that makes up the glory of white noon in a southern garden. And in the radiant midst of it all, a small gray figure wandered restlessly from bush to bush, from the bed of large pale violets to the tufts of windflowers, from the orange trees to the riotous tangle of tiny golden roses.

"Herr Baby! Oh, Herr Baby! You have broken that chair this time !" said Frau Horn.

"And knocked over my table,— and my work,-oh, do be careful, you very awkward boy! Can't you learn to remember that your feet are about a mile away from the rest of you?" added the little Baroness with a twinkle; but he was out of hearing, for he had seen Peggy going round the garden to say good-bye to the flowers she loved so well, and he had flung himself out of the window to have the chance of a last talk with her. He arrived upon his hands and face instead of upon his feet reasonably; but every one was used to the big Dutchman's clumsiness and no one more than himself, so he took such incidents as a matter of course, unconcernedly.

He had been big, inconveniently, undesirably big-all his life, he said, though to be sure that was not such a very long time. But nobody would

have thought he was so young; even his awkwardness, which was colossal, as Frau Horn said plaintively, was not of a juvenile kind, and his huge limbs and spreading shoulders had something of the aged and ungainly look which is the birthright of an elephant. Then he had big, uneven features, that were built together in a studied irregularity, and a rough mane of red hair which never settled itself in less than two or three directions. Altogether, as his old Dutch nurse had said of him when he was (relatively) a small boy, “Hendrik isn't handsome, and there's so much of him that one never has a chance of forgetting it." He had a way, moreover, of looking so ponderously solemn, even in his most frivolous moments, that the very idea of youth seemed ridiculous in connection with him. There had, in fact, been a shout of laughter when it was discovered one night that he was only Peggie's elder by a few weeks; and she, who had hitherto been made much of as the baby of the Pension, transferred to him maliciously half her proprietary interest in the title. Ever since that he had been called among them Herr Baby, to replace the difficult gutturals that made up his name by right; as she had long been nothing other than Ma'amselle Baby even to the French chambermaids. For it takes so little to make one laugh in the midst of sunshine and flowers, and the uplifted mountains that shut out of sight the gray face of winter, and, perhaps, that other shrouded phantom from the fear of which one has for a little while got free.

The nickname was the little Baroness's doing in the first instance. She had made a pet of Peggie for the sake of her bright ways and laughing face, though, if it came to that, no one could be more elfinly merry and lovable than the little old lady herself. But then, if one has been crippled all one's life, in the course of time one arrives at being either a very detestable person, or just such a fairy godmother as only a tiny old woman with the merriest wit in the world can be; and having chosen the latter, she had developed into a very exquisite morsel of humanity indeed. And she And she had set herself to pet and spoil Peggie with all her might, seeing, in her sweet shrewd wisdom, that the girl had pined for the want of it throughout her dreary young life; and since Hendrik, the big Dutchman, had been adopted as the other baby, the little Baroness had petted him too, though with a hesitating familiarity, much as one pats a great awkward dog that is apt to sweep the table with his responsive tail.

There had perhaps been a good deal of jealousy between Hendrik and Peggie (though, to be sure, it was all on one side) when the little old lady first began to divide her favours; but when you are only nineteen and wholesomely unsentimental, it is so much easier to be good friends, especially when the one is a pretty mischievous little girl, and the other a huge, good-natured, companionable boy. And after all, his very awkwardness nad only been another excuse for laughter, and they were so ready to laugh in this safe little corner of the hills where it seemed so easy not to be ill; and Hendrik and Peggie had been the best of friends,-till, on a sudden, the end had come, and the news of her uncle's illness had summoned her home.

Peggie was wandering about the

garden, feeling very miserable. She had been so happy here, where everyone had been kind to her, and the sense of being a petted child among them had been so unfamiliar and so sweet. And it was hard to go back to that dark silent house where she was so little wanted, away from the sunshine and the large air and the flowers; even here she shivered when she thought of the gloomy street, all the more dull and lonely that London lay close outside of it. And she would be shut into it again, as she had been before, till all the old tired feelings came back, and the headaches and the pale cheeks that the sun had driven away. Yes, she was very unhappy; and yet when Hendrik picked himself up from the rosebed into which he had tumbled, and slouched towards her, she met him with laughter.

"Oh," she cried, "Herr Baby, if you could only see yourself! Your face is covered with scratches, and you look so, and besides, you'll spoil the roses, and it's such a pity!" He shook his red head solemnly. "I know," he said, in his guttural NorthDutch voice, "I know; I've spoiled them already. Bother! What does it matter? You are going away, and there's no one else that cares about them. And it can't make me any uglier than I am already."

Peggie surveyed him thoughtfully. "Oh, but I think it does," she said with an idea of consolation that was well meant; "yes, really it does. Besides, it makes you look as if you had been fighting, and that isn't respectable, you know, for a person of your age. Oh, Herr Baby, it's all very well to laugh, but isn't it dreadful that I must go away?"

Hendrik growled gutturally.

"It's all very well for you," she went on, with tears in her eyes; "you need not go for another month

yet, and you can come back next winter. I hate rich people that can do all sorts of things, when I can't. And you needn't pretend you come here for any reason except that you like it; nobody could be ill that had such great wide shoulders, I'm sure. Oh, you may cough, if you like, but that's nothing. When I was sent here, I had been ill, really ill, only uncle said he couldn't afford such useless expense again, and this time I had better just d-die. And then you are going to Holland, you horrid boy, to nice picturesque Holland, that I'd give anything to see. And I,-I must go back to that disgusting old street."

Peggie was more than half crying, and the words tumbled out unrestrainedly. She looked very small and very childish, standing in the midst of the blaze of sunshine, with her eyes tearful and shining under the shadow of her hat. Hendrik objected to that big hat; so often, in regarding her, he could see nothing but the top of it.

"I had much rather go to London than home to Holland," he said with gloom. "And I hate this place now. What shall we do without you? What will Signor Baruca do? What will the little Baroness do? And what shall I do, good Heavens! without Ma'amselle Baby?"

"You!" she answered, laughing through her tears; "you will break some more furniture and,-and I'm afraid you will let the little Baroness tumble. I don't think you really ought to try to help her about; and I hate that you should take my place."

"She wouldn't let me help her; and I could never take your place even if I tried. There isn't any one that could do things as,- -as you do them. But when your uncle is better, can't you come back?"

"No," she said sorrowfully; "you

see he only sent me here because the doctor ordered it, and I had a few pounds of my own to pay for the journey. He told me he wouldn't do it again, so I needn't fall ill on purpose. He is not very kind, you see, and perhaps he is not very rich, or at least, he thinks he ought to spend his money on himself. And as it is, he has to dress and feed me, and I dare say I cost him a great deal. And he thinks I ought to stay at home; he says all this fancy for change of air is nonsense. I wouldn't mind so much

if he wanted me, or if there were anything for me to do. But as it

is

"There may be other people that want you," Hendrik remarked, with his eyes on the ground.

"There isn't any one else," she said with a sigh; "I have no one in the world that belongs to me but my uncle. That is why I have been so happy here, it has only been a holiday to you; but to me it was home-a great deal more homelike than anything I have ever seen."

"You, you wouldn't marry me, I suppose?" he said suddenly, without looking at her.

"Marry you!" Peggie gasped helplessly. "Oh no! What an idea! I don't want to marry anybody,—and,— and oh, how funny to think of marrying you, you queer big boy!"

She broke into candid laughter, while Hendrik dug holes in the gravel with his foot. Peggie regarded him heartlessly; the scratches on his face made him really look so absurd; and how cross he was, to be sure,-any one would have thought that he was in earnest. But of course it was all nonsense. She put her hand through his arm, and stood on tip-toe to see him better.

"Now, Herr Baby," she said, “you know you don't mean it. Why, you never even thought of it till just this