him.

'I'm afraid your feet are very wet, dear. What a terrible morning! Let me
take your hat. Your slippers are at the fire.'

Mr. Barton was feeling a little cold and cross. It is difficult, when you
have been doing disagreeable duties, without praise, on a snowy day, to
attend to the very minor morals. So he showed no recognition of Milly's
attentions, but simply said, 'Fetch me my dressing-gown, will you?'

'It is down, dear. I thought you wouldn't go into the study, because you
said you would letter and number the books for the Lending Library. Patty
and I have been covering them, and they are all ready in the
sitting-room.'

'Oh, I can't do those this morning,' said Mr. Barton, as he took off his
boots and put his feet into the slippers Milly had brought him; 'you must
put them away into the parlour.'

The sitting-room was also the day nursery and schoolroom; and while
Mamma's back was turned, Dickey, the second boy, had insisted on
superseding Chubby in the guidance of a headless horse, of the
red-wafered species, which she was drawing round the room, so that when
Papa opened the door Chubby was giving tongue energetically.

'Milly, some of these children must go away. I want to be quiet.'

'Yes, dear. Hush, Chubby; go with Patty, and see what Nanny is getting
for our dinner. Now, Fred and Sophy and Dickey, help me to carry these
books into the parlour. There are three for Dickey. Carry them steadily.'

Papa meanwhile settled himself in his easy-chair, and took up a work on
Episcopacy, which he had from the Clerical Book Society; thinking he
would finish it and return it this afternoon, as he was going to the
Clerical Meeting at Milby Vicarage, where the Book Society had its
headquarters.

The Clerical Meetings and Book Society, which had been founded some eight
or ten months, had had a noticeable effect on the Rev. Amos Barton. When
he first came to Shepperton he was simply an evangelical clergyman, whose
Christian experiences had commenced under the teaching of the Rev. Mr.
Johns, of Gun Street Chapel, and had been consolidated at Cambridge under
the influence of Mr. Simeon. John Newton and Thomas Scott were his
doctrinal ideals; he would have taken in the "Christian Observer" and the
"Record," if he could have afforded it; his anecdotes were chiefly of the
pious-jocose kind, current in dissenting circles; and he thought an
Episcopalian Establishment unobjectionable.

But by this time the effect of