ehold the life that her soul
thus strangely influenced, verily with yet holier joy the saving and
lovely spirit might have glided onward in the Eternal Progress.

We call the large majority of human lives obscure. Presumptuous that we
are! How know we what lives a single thought retained from the dust of
nameless graves may have lighted to renown?

CHAPTER XI.

It was about a year after Leonard's discovery of the family manuscripts
that Parson Dale borrowed the quietest pad-mare in the squire's stables,
and set out on an equestrian excursion. He said that he was bound on
business connected with his old parishioners of Lansmere; for, as it has
been incidentally implied in a previous chapter, he had been connected
with that borough town (and, I may here add, in the capacity of curate)
before he had been inducted into the living of Hazeldean.

It was so rarely that the parson stirred from home, that this journey
to a town more than twenty miles off was regarded as a most daring
adventure, both at the Hall and at the Parsonage. Mrs. Dale could not
sleep the whole previous night with thinking of it; and though she had
naturally one of her worst nervous headaches on the eventful morn,
she yet suffered no hands less thoughtful than her own to pack up the
saddle-bags which the parson had borrowed along with the pad. Nay, so
distrustful was she of the possibility of the good man's exerting the
slightest common-sense in her absence, that she kept him close at
her side while she was engaged in that same operation of
packing-up,--showing him the exact spot in which the clean shirt was
put; and how nicely the old slippers were packed up in one of his
own sermons. She implored him not to mistake the sandwiches for his
shaving-soap, and made him observe how carefully she had provided
against such confusion, by placing them as far apart from each other as
the nature of saddle-bags will admit. The poor parson--who was really
by no means an absent man, but as little likely to shave himself with
sandwiches and lunch upon soap as the most commonplace mortal may
be--listened with conjugal patience, and thought that man never had such
a wife before; nor was it without tears in his own eyes that he tore
himself from the farewell embrace of his weeping Carry.

I confess, however, that it was with some apprehension that he set
his foot in the stirrup, and trusted his person to the mercies of
an unfamiliar animal. For, whatever might