f he is no saint, thank Heaven, and the
parson knows better than to preach at him."

"Next Sunday," said the Kyrkegrim to the priest, "preach about something
which concerns every one; respectable people as well as others."

So the preacher preached of Death--whom tears cannot move, nor riches
bribe, nor power defy. The uncertain interruption and the only certain
end of all life's labors! And as he preached, the women sitting in their
seats wept for the dead whose graves they had been tending, and down the
aged cheeks of the Kyrkegrim there stole tears of pity for poor men,
whose love and labors are cut short so soon.

But the farmer slept as before.

"Do you not expect to die?" asked the Kyrkegrim.

"Surely," replied the farmer, "we must all die some day, and one does
not need a preacher to tell him that. But it was a funeral sermon, my
wife thinks. There has been bereavement in the miller's family."

"Men are a strange race," thought the Kyrkegrim; but he went to the
priest and said--"The farmer is not afraid of death. You must find some
subject of which men really stand in awe."

So when Sunday came round again, the preacher preached of judgment--that
dread Avenger who dogs the footsteps of trespass, even now! That awful
harvest of whirlwind and corruption which they must reap who sow to the
wind and to the flesh! Lightly regarded, but biding its time, till a
man's forgotten follies find him out at last.

But the farmer slept on. He did not wake when the preacher spoke of
judgment to come, the reckoning that cannot be shunned, the trump of the
Archangel, and the Day of Doom.

"On Michaelmas Day I shall preach myself," said the Kyrkegrim, "and if I
cannot rouse him, I shall give up my charge here."

This troubled the poor priest, for so good a Kyrkegrim was not likely to
be found again.

Nevertheless he consented, for he was very meek, and when Michaelmas Day
came the Kyrkegrim pulled a preacher's gown over his homespun coat, and
laid his round hat on the desk by the iron-clamped Bible, and began his
sermon.

"I shall give no text," said he, "but when I have said what seems good
to me, it is for those who hear to see if the Scriptures bear me out."

This was an uncommon beginning, and most of the good folk pricked their
ears, the farmer among them, for novelty is agreeable in church as
elsewhere.

"I speak," said the Kyrkegrim, "of that which is the last result of sin,
the worst of deaths, and the begi