the Evil One and all his Spirits and
obeying God with whose voice the Church speaks. Now, for the last time
children, let me hear you sing _We are but little children weak_."

They all sang more loudly than usual to express a vague and troubled
sympathy:

_There's not a child so small and weak_
_But has his little cross to take,_
_His little work of love and praise_
_That he may do for Jesus' sake._

And they bleated a most canorous _Amen_.

Mark noticed that his mother clutched his hand tightly while his father
was speaking, and when once he looked up at her to show how loudly he
too was singing, he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

The next morning was Monday.

"Good-bye, Mark, be a good boy and obedient to your mother," said his
father on the platform at Paddington.

"Who is that man?" Mark whispered when the guard locked them in.

His mother explained, and Mark looked at him with as much awe as if he
were St. Peter with the keys of Heaven at his girdle. He waved his
handkerchief from the window while the train rushed on through tunnels
and between gloomy banks until suddenly the world became green, and
there was the sun in a great blue and white sky. Mark looked at his
mother and saw that again there were tears in her eyes, but that they
sparkled like diamonds.

CHAPTER VI

NANCEPEAN

The Rhos or, as it is popularly written and pronounced, the Rose is a
tract of land in the south-west of the Duchy of Cornwall, ten miles long
and six at its greatest breadth, which on account of its remoteness from
the railway, its unusual geological formation, and its peninsular shape
possesses both in the character of its inhabitants and in the peculiar
aspects of the natural scene all the limitations and advantages of an
island. The main road running south to Rose Head from Rosemarket cuts
the peninsula into two unequal portions, the eastern and by far the
larger of which consists of a flat tableland two or three hundred feet
above the sea covered with a bushy heath, which flourishes in the
magnesian soil and which when in bloom is of such a clear rosy pink,
with nothing to break the level monochrome except scattered drifts of
cotton grass, pools of silver water and a few stunted pines, that
ignorant observers have often supposed that the colour gave its name to
the whole peninsula. The ancient town of Rosemarket, which serves as the
only channel of communication with the rest of Cornwal