faster. At last he is over the
border of moderation before he conceives that he had so much as
approached it. Then, alas! the word "moderation" stands for an unknown
quantity, easy to use but hard to define, since one man's moderation may
be another man's excess, and to-day's moderation may be an excess to-
morrow.

Poor Frank was never more in earnest than when he promised Mary Oliphant
that he would observe strict moderation. He had everything to induce
him to keep his word--his love for Mary; his desire to please his own
parents, who had begun to tremble for him; his own self-respect. So he
left the rectory strong as a lion in his own estimation, yet not without
a sort of misgiving underlying his conviction of his own firmness; but
he would not listen to that misgiving for a moment.

"I mean to be what I have promised, and I _will_ be," he said to
himself. "Mary shall see that, easy and self-indulgent as I have been,
I can be rigid as iron when I have the will to be so."

Poor Frank! he did not knew his own weakness; he did not know that his
was not a will of iron, but was like a foot once badly sprained, which
has lost its firm and unfaltering tread. Happy would it have been for
him had he sought a strength higher than his own--the strength from
above.

For several weeks he kept strictly to his purpose. He limited himself
to so much beer and wine, and never exceeded. He became proud of his
firmness, forgetting that there had been nothing to test the stamina of
his resolution.

At last the annual harvest-home came round. It was a season of great
festivity at Greymoor Park. Sir Thomas, as we have said, wished all his
tenants and labourers to be sober, and spoke to that effect on these
occasions; at the same time he was equally anxious that both meat and
drink should be dealt out with no niggard hand. So men and women took
as much as they liked, and the squire was very careful to make no very
strict inquiries as to the state of any of his work-people on the
following day; and if any case of intemperance on these occasions came
to his knowledge afterwards, as commonly happened, it was winked at,
unless of a very gross and open character.

"Poor fellows," said the good-natured landlord, "it's only once in a
year that they get such a feast, and I must not be too strict with them.
There's many a good fellow gets a little too much on these days, who is
an excellent steady workman and father all the rest o