ferent; the dash and spontaneity had departed with independence, and left him almost depressing to one who had known him in more prosperous times. After so many unfortunate cases it is pleasant to be able to record one of improvement. The man, a steady and industrious fellow, was earning a pitiably small, though constant wage, when a legacy of £10 or £12 came to him, with which he determined to try to improve his position. A little shop was taken in a new neighborhood, and under his wife's management it did astonishingly well, so well indeed that after some months the man determined to leave his situation and throw all his energy into the business. He gave notice to his firm, explaining the circumstances, but apparently his employers had known his real worth all the time. They immediately offered to double his money, and held out prospects of a better position. Of course, he accepted the offer, and after a while he was made foreman, with a sufficiently good income to enable his wife to retire into private life again; but I am afraid the lack of nourishing food during their penurious days had left them a legacy of bad health that would not succumb to the persuasions of their better fortunes.

Mrs. H.'s husband I never saw, but his old father, who had retired from work and lived with them, was gener、 ally in the kitchen when I called. He was a thick-set, bluff-looking old boy who had earned his living on the water. Directly I entered he used to rise from his chair and, with a gigantic guffaw and a look of would-be mischievous raillery, beat a retreat, invariably saying with an indescribable chuckle as he went: "This ain't no place for me, I can see." One day I missed him, and Mrs. H. told me that he was ill. "He isn't really bad," she said in a whisper, "but he thinks he is, and he wants to see you." This surprised me very

much, and I entered his room somewhat tremblingly, for visiting sick old men was not part of my programme. My entrance was greeted by a deep groan from Mr. H. senior, and in reply to my cheerful enquiries he returned a very mournful answer: "I'm bad, Miss, oh-bad!" An embarrassed silence on my part followed, and then I asked him if there was anything I could do for him. "I thought as you'd like to read a bit of Bible to me, Miss," was the reproachful reply. I hastily proposed fetching the vicar, who, I was sure, would be glad to do anything of that nature. The sick man sat up in alarmed surprise. "You don't think I'm bad enough for that, Miss, do you?" he demanded. When I grasped the point of view I reassured him, and, succumbing to the inevitable, I obtained a Bible. "What would you like me to read?" I asked; and again he looked hurt. "I thought you'd know what was best suited to my case, Miss," he said. I busily turned over the pages, and, when my voice was sufficiently steady, read for about a quarter of an hour. "Would you like any more?" I asked, as no remark was forthcoming from the bed. "As you think, Miss," was the meek reply; and I thought not. I do not believe he had heard or attempted to hear a single word; the reading was the proper thing and was all-sufficient. My visits and reading were continued for three days, after which I was given my release. "I think I'm all right now, Miss," he informed me; "I shall get up by and bye." I lost and gained by that illness. I gained at least five minutes of old Mr. H.'s company at each of my subsequent visits, but I never again heard him say, "This ain't no place for me, I can see," and I really think my loss was greater than our combined gains.

To offer and to make these people feel her sympathy is the role of the Dis

trict Visitor. And in order to be successful she must have a certain amount of magnetic force, unlimited tact, and an earnest wish to help. Given these and a plentitude of patience, a realm of hearts is open to her, the possession of which must add fullness to her own life. The reward is not so much gratitude as affection,-a brightening of faces and a gladdening of souls. Confidence once gained, the good that can be done is incalculable. Steady, sensible advice, subtle influence, sometimes the expenditure of a few pence on a pot of geraniums to start an interest, sometimes a judicious praising of the windows and doorstep of the next house. An old skirt cut before the Macmillan's Magazine.

mother's eye into a wearable garment for the little girl will open undreamed possibilities to her. In fact, opportunities for helpful help are endless. Sometimes the work is not at all pleasant; there is dirt and there is disease. I have been asked to look at Tommy's throat and found myself staring into fully developed diphtheria; and I have helped to hold down a strong woman suffering from a bad form of epilepsy. But the visitor must not be seen to shrink from her task. To do so would be to lose confidence and influence, and to lose that would be to forfeit her great and satisfying reward.

A. F. C.

Passions ran strong in those days, whether for good or ill, on Lonesome Heath. It seemed the moor folk had learned all their life's lessons from the winds that bent the oaks and sycamores and hazels into queer shapes and knots and tangles; for in truth the folk, like the wind, followed their own way, now at tempest speed, now with a steady forward sweep that carried all before it, and heeded little of what met them in the way.

Parson Shaw, whose church was known as St. John's in the Wilderness, whose cure embraced some five hundred scattered souls that dwelt upon the edges of the heath-Parson Shaw was no whit behind his fellows in those qualities of passion which, by virtue of his calling, he should have railed upon.

Forty years of his age, straightbodied, square-shouldered, with a big head set back in fighting attitude, he was for all the world like his own church, the grim, squat-towered pile of weather-roughened stone that overlocked the heath.

Wayfarers, with little to guide them across the miles of peat and barrenness, would make the sturdy kirk, set high against the skyline, a landmark and a beacon, just as they do to-day; and then, as now, the few strangers who halted at the place, and pushed open the gate of the kirkyard and passed within, were awed by the silence and the stealthy underfret of tragedy that lurked between the blackened headstones. But then-in the days that went just before the Tragedy of Parson Shaw-there was one dark scene that had not yet given its last gloom to this God's acre of St. John's in the Wilderness. To-day the sexton tells you of it, and his toothless gums go chattering one against the other as his tale moves forward; and small wonder, for it is a story such as makes the wind get up and shiver to this day, and to this day the dwellers round about wild Lonesome Heath can hear "Mad Parson" crying up and down the moor-crying, so they say, as plain as ever man spoke yet, that Judgment

and the Wrath have hold of him forever.

To-day, with the murk of a blood-red gloaming over heath and graves, with the curlews plaining and the moor-tits chattering dolefully, it is easy to return along the pathway of the years and, watching constantly the dark grave in the corner yonder, to see the tale lived out afresh.

Parson Shaw had come to forty years, and had kept his lips from women's; and now, in this spring of 1801, it seemed that the flush of the dawning summer had touched his own heart too. For there came a maid to the house which lies below the church -lies in a sheltered dingle of its own, where the first primroses come out in fear and shyness-and the maid was like no other that any man had seen upon the moor. Nay, the tough Parson's heart was like a lad's again when first he saw her, and long-forgotten glamor came upon him, and he likened her to those same first primroses which ushered in the spring.

And, truth, the picture was all made up of sweetness as the Parson came down the lane to Windward Farm to sup, according to his wont on Saturdays, with Farmer Hirst. The sun was dropping behind the feathery first leaves of a larch; the throstle whistled sweet and clear; the farm itself, with its low latticed windows, looked out upon a garden bright with the last of the crocuses and the earliest of the auriculas; while round about the seven hives that stood under the house-lee the bees sent up a drowsy evensong.

Dorothy Hirst, in a muslin gown too slight for an April eventide among the moors, sat on the top step of the porch, a print apron-clover-pink-setting off her slim young shapeliness. And she was singing, much as the throstle was, from sheer love of life and innocence of harm.

All this the Parson saw as he turned the corner of the lane; and his heart, roughened with heedlessness through all these years, grew soft upon the sudden, and he stopped, his mouth half-open like a country clown's, and leaned upon his stick, and watched and watched the lass until she seemed to feel his nearness, and stopped her singing, and glanced up.

Then Parson Shaw came forward and lifted his beaver with a gallantry not often practised by him in his parish; and the girl rose, and dropped a curtsey, and laughed shamefacedly,

"Nay, I am but niece to Farmer Hirst," said she, "and little used to liftings of the hat."

"I uncovered to your bonniness, not to your quality," the Parson answered bluntly.

Whereat she dropped another curtsey, glancing sideways at him with an archness all made up of innocence, and playfulness, and pity for the foolishness of one so old. For the Parson was stained and wrinkled by the wear and tear of hard hunting, hard living, hard ministering among a folk whose needs would often summon him from bed on stormy nights; he looked more than his forty years, and even forty seems old age to a maid of eighteen years.

"Will you be pleased to step indoors, sir?" she asked, making way for him. "Uncle looked for you a halfhour since, and the board is ready spread."

Farmer Hirst was already at the door, however, having heard the Parson's voice, and was thrusting a great red hand into his guest's.

"Come away in, Parson!" he cried cheerily. "Come away in, and never let a good welcome cool."

"I was called to christen Eli Reddhiough's brat," explained the other, though his eyes were still on Dorothy, as if he'd never be finished with look

kist, or drunk, or what. But he said nothing, being at all times slow of speech, and slower now than ever in face of this hard liver, who talked poetry by inadvertence, as it were. For the farmer had missed both love and wedlock, and, missing it, would lack understanding, through all the remainder of his days, of what a man may feel for the one woman in his life.

"How comes she here?" asked Parson Shaw, after a long silence.

"Oh, well, as for that, 'tis simple enough. You've heard me talk of my brother John, who ran from home when he was a shoulder-height, and went to sea, and made a bit of a fortune, like? Well, he couldn't bide away from the old spot, and yet he couldn't bring himself to settle quite so far away as what he called the last place God ever made; and so he went to Skipton, with his one lass, and lived and died there, and troubled me SO little that you and he have never chanced across one another."

"But the maid-the maid?" said the Parson, impatiently.

"Why, sir, John was always queer in his ways, and he said naught to me in his lifetime of what he meant her to be done with after his death; but when it came to reading his will, it seemed the maid was to stay on at some school or other where he'd placed her, like, until she rose to eighteen of her years; and then she was to come to me."

The Parson nodded briskly. "Thou'rt lucky, Hirst-lucky."

"Oh, well, as for that, I'm fond enough o' the lass, and she's a bit like summer in a house I'll own. Anyway, Parson, here she is came yesternight, with a trunk as high as Pendle Hilland here she'll bide, I reckon, till her courting days come on. Now, you were talking of Monday's hunt.

The

fox'll break cover, think ye, at Fairy Dene?"

Parson Shaw laid down his pipe, pulled out a great horn snuffbox from under the lapel of his coat, and took a careful pinch.

"I'm not just thinking of the hunt," he said. "I'm thinking of that lass of yours. Her courting days have come."

Farmer Hirst, after all, had been reared amidst the upland weather, and so was proof against overmuch surprise.

"Oh, ay?" he answered guardedly.

"I see a fence, and I take it; 'tis not my way to think about it," went on the other. "I mean to wed that lass before the summer's over."

66

The farmer mixed himself a measure of Hollands and drank it slowly. ""Tis what ye might call a bit sudden-like, eh, Parson?" said he, setting down the empty tumbler.

"Ay, as sudden as falling out of the saddle; but just as sure. See you, Hiram Hirst, I've never had a fancy in my head for any woman till to-night -my dogs and my horses and my parish have taken all my time and a woman takes a, man hard when he comes to forty and one."

"Now, then, 'tis all very well, Parson-'tis all very well, I say, for ye to come and sup with us, neighborfashion, and to tell your tales beside the hearthstone, and all like one of ourselves, as a body might say-but blood's blood, and you're of the quality

"Tut, man! Blood's blood, to be sure, and it races soon or late with every man at sight of a maid's face."

"Just hear me out, Parson," went on the older man, the dignity of pride upon him-a pride rooted in the hills that shut in Windward Farm. "When I say you're of the quality I've no thought of bowing and scraping to you, or pretending the maid isn't