s, had known all the deep secrets of
devoted love, had struggled through its days and nights of anguish, and
trembled under its unspeakable joys.

And indeed the Mr. Gilfil of those late Shepperton days had more of the
knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear hint
of in the open-eyed loving Maynard. But it is with men as with trees: if
you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their
young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss,
some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding
into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an
irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow,
which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into
plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our
harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb
is withered.

And so the dear old Vicar, though he had something of the knotted
whimsical character of the poor lopped oak, had yet been sketched out by
nature as a noble tree. The heart of him was sound, the grain was of the
finest; and in the grey-haired man who filled his pocket with sugar-plums
for the little children, whose most biting words were directed against
the evil doing of the rich man, and who, with all his social pipes and
slipshod talk, never sank below the highest level of his parishioners'
respect, there was the main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender
nature that had poured out the finest, freshest forces of its
life-current in a first and only love--the love of Tina.

JANET'S REPENTANCE

Chapter 1

'No!' said lawyer Dempster, in a loud, rasping, oratorical tone,
struggling against chronic huskiness, 'as long as my Maker grants me
power of voice and power of intellect, I will take every legal means to
resist the introduction of demoralizing, methodistical doctrine into this
parish; I will not supinely suffer an insult to be inflicted on our
venerable pastor, who has given us sound instruction for half a century.'

It was very warm everywhere that evening, but especially in the bar of
the Red Lion at Milby, where Mr. Dempster was seated mixing his third
glass of brandy-and-water. He was a tall and rather massive man, and the
front half of his large surface was so well dredged' with snuff, that the
cat, having inadvertently come near him, had been seized with a severe
fit