save the
emigrant and whatever specially concerned him. The familiar homes far
back from the road, he remembered them well. His own home, he knew, had
been ravaged by fire, and scarcely a vestige of it remained. His parents
were no more. He could not, if he had wished it, shed penitent tears
over their graves; for their bones were mouldering in a far-away
ancestral vault, with no kindly grass to mantle them, and no glad wild
flowers to whisper of a coming resurrection. The possessions that should
have been his had been willed away to strangers. The once well-known
family name was now rarely heard in the neighbourhood, and then only
sorrowfully whispered as connected with the sad and almost forgotten
past.

It was Sunday morning. The church bell had rung out its peals the
appointed number of times, and now all was silent, for the rustic
worshippers were gathered within the sacred walls.

The congregation were all seated, and the Confession was being repeated,
when a tall, slender man, with peculiarly broad shoulders and a
peculiarly small waist, came with an ungainly gait up the aisle, holding
in his hand a limp felt hat as if it were glued fast to his long, thin
fingers.

He stopped a moment, as if mechanically, before a full pew, and then
stood doubtfully in the aisle.

A little chubby girl perched just behind him had not been too devout to
observe the proceedings of the stranger. She unhooked the door of the
seat in which she was established alone with her mother. The slight
click attracted, as she had hoped, the attention of the new worshipper.
She whispered to her bowed mother, "He has no place to sit; may I let
him in to us?" The head was slightly nodded in reply; the door was
gently pushed open; and the stranger sat down in the offered place. His
dark face was thin, and wrinkled too much apparently for his years. His
thick black hair and beard were irregularly streaked in locks with
white, rather than grey with the usual even sprinkling brought about by
age alone; and his forehead threatened to stretch backward far beyond
the usual frontal bounds. He apparently took no part in the service. His
eyes seemed looking far away from priest and altar, and his ears were
dead to the words that fell upon them.

Above the chancel there had been a painting representing the Lord's
Supper, not copied even second or third hand from Leonardo's
masterpiece, but from the work of some far more humble artist. The
cracks that