er, but for her mother's ominously growing
weakness. The sisters were strangely overclouded by this incident. They
could not fathom the meaning of their father's unkindness, coarseness,
and indignation. Why, and why? they asked one another, blankly. The
Scriptures were harsh in one part, but was the teaching to continue so
after the Atonement? By degrees they came to reflect, and not in a mild
spirit, that the kindest of men can be cruel, and will forget their
Christianity toward offending and repentant women.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Fleming had a brother in London, who had run away from his Kentish
home when a small boy, and found refuge at a Bank. The position of
Anthony Hackbut in that celebrated establishment, and the degree of
influence exercised by him there, were things unknown; but he had stuck
to the Bank for a great number of years, and he had once confessed to his
sister that he was not a beggar. Upon these joint facts the farmer
speculated, deducing from them that a man in a London Bank, holding money
of his own, must have learnt the ways of turning it over--farming golden
ground, as it were; consequently, that amount must now have increased to
a very considerable sum. You ask, What amount? But one who sits brooding
upon a pair of facts for years, with the imperturbable gravity of
creation upon chaos, will be as successful in evoking the concrete from
the abstract. The farmer saw round figures among the possessions of the
family, and he assisted mentally in this money-turning of Anthony's,
counted his gains for him, disposed his risks, and eyed the pile of
visionary gold with an interest so remote, that he was almost correct in
calling it disinterested. The brothers-in-law had a mutual plea of
expense that kept them separate. When Anthony refused, on petition, to
advance one hundred pounds to the farmer, there was ill blood to divide
them. Queen Anne's Farm missed the flourishing point by one hundred
pounds exactly. With that addition to its exchequer, it would have made
head against its old enemy, Taxation, and started rejuvenescent. But the
Radicals were in power to legislate and crush agriculture, and "I've got
a miser for my brother-in-law," said the farmer. Alas! the hundred pounds
to back him, he could have sowed what he pleased, and when it pleased
him, partially defying the capricious clouds and their treasures, and
playing tunefully upon his land, his own land. Instead of which, and
while too keenl