service, and when I looks to the upper end I sees that the eyes of the
young clergyman her husband is fixed on her, as mine is.

"And of all the words which he preached that day and the verses he spoke
with so much readiness, I could not repeat one to you, my daughter, to
save my life, except the words he was saying just then, and they remains
in my ears as her face remains before my eyes,--

"'GOD is not unrighteous, that He will forget your work, and
labour which proceedeth of love.'"

CHAPTER VI.

"We are all creatures of habit." So my learned uncle, Draen y Coed, who
was a Welsh hedgehog, used to say. "Which was why an ancestor of my own,
who acted as turnspit in the kitchen of a farmhouse in Yorkshire, quite
abandoned the family custom of walking out in the cool of the evening,
and declared that he couldn't take two steps in comfort except in a
circle, and in front of a kitchen-fire at roasting heat."

Uncle Draen y Coed was right, and I must add that I doubt if, in all his
experience, or among the strange traditions of his most eccentric
ancestors, he could find an instance of change of habits so unexpected,
so complete, I may say so headlong, as when very quiet people, with an
almost surly attachment to home, break the bounds of the domestic
circle, and take to gadding, gossiping, and excitement.

Perhaps it is because they find that their fellow-creatures are nicer
than they have been wont to allow them to be, and that other people's
affairs are quite as interesting as their own.

Perhaps--but what is the good of trying to explain infatuations?

Why do we all love valerian? I can only record that, having set up every
prickle on our backs against intruders into our wood, we now dreaded
nothing more than that our neighbours should forsake us, and wished for
nothing better than for fresh arrivals.

In old days, when my excellent partner and I used to take our evening
stroll up the field, we were wont to regard it quite as a grievance if a
cousin, who lived at the far end of the hedge, came out and caught us
and detained us for a gossip. But now I could hardly settle to my midday
nap for thinking of the tinker-mother; and as to Mrs. Hedgehog, she
almost annoyed me by her anxiety to see Christian. However, curiosity is
the foible of her sex, and I accompanied her daily to the encampment
without a murmur.

The seven urchins we sent down to the burdocks to pick snails.

It was not many days after