one in a
distant county. The parish was in a large manufacturing town, where his
walks would lie among noisy streets and dingy alleys, and where the
children would have no garden to play in, no pleasant farm-houses to
visit.

It was another blow inflicted on the bruised man.

Chapter 10

At length the dreaded week was come, when Amos and his children must
leave Shepperton. There was general regret among the parishioners at his
departure: not that any one of them thought his spiritual gifts
pre-eminent, or was conscious of great edification from his ministry. But
his recent troubles had called out their better sympathies, and that is
always a source of love. Amos failed to touch the spring of goodness by
his sermons, but he touched it effectually by his sorrows; and there was
now a real bond between him and his flock.

'My heart aches for them poor motherless children,' said Mrs. Hackit to
her husband, 'a-going among strangers, and into a nasty town, where
there's no good victuals to be had, and you must pay dear to get bad
uns.'

Mrs. Hackit had a vague notion of a town life as a combination of dirty
backyards, measly pork, and dingy linen.

The same sort of sympathy was strong among the poorer class of
parishioners. Old stiff-jointed Mr. Tozer, who was still able to earn a
little by gardening 'jobs', stopped Mrs. Cramp, the charwoman, on her way
home from the Vicarage, where she had been helping Nanny to pack up the
day before the departure, and inquired very particularly into Mr.
Barton's prospects.

'Ah, poor mon,' he was heard to say, 'I'm sorry for un. He hedn't much
here, but he'll be wuss off theer. Half a loaf's better nor ne'er un.'

The sad good-byes had all been said before that last evening; and after
all the packing was done and all the arrangements were made, Amos felt
the oppression of that blank interval in which one has nothing left to
think of but the dreary future--the separation from the loved and
familiar, and the chilling entrance on the new and strange. In every
parting there is an image of death.

Soon after ten o'clock, when he had sent Nanny to bed, that she might
have a good night's rest before the fatigues of the morrow, he stole
softly out to pay a last visit to Milly's grave. It was a moonless night,
but the sky was thick with stars, and their light was enough to show that
the grass had grown long on the grave, and that there was a tombstone
telling in bright letters, on