thened by her
sympathy! But he knew that it was impossible to call to his aid the
woman whom it was his first duty to protect from annoyance. She should
never know the torture he was enduring until it had came to an end, and
he could tell it with his own lips as an indifferent story of the past.

CHAPTER XVIII.

A SLEEPY NOOK.

Three miles from Angleford, on the other side of the river, and hidden
away by trees on every side, sleeps the lazy little village of
Birchmead. So lazy is the place--so undisturbed have been its slumbers,
from generation to generation, that it might puzzle the most curious to
think why a village should be built there at all. There is no ford
through the river, and, though a leaky ferryboat makes occasional
journeys from one side to the other, the path which leads to the bank is
too precipitous for any horse to tread. The only route by which a cart
can enter Birchmead branches off from the Dorminster Road, across a
quarter of a mile of meadows: and when the gate of the first meadow is
closed, the village is completely shut in on every side. The world
scarcely knows it, and it does not know the world--its life is "but a
sleep and a forgetting."

The place has a history of its own, which can be told in a couple of
sentences. Two hundred years ago an eccentric member of the family to
which the country-side belonged had chosen to set up here a little
community on his own account, shaped on a model which, universally
applied would doubtless regenerate the world. He built, out of stone, a
farmhouse and barns, and a score of cottages for his working-men, and
there he spent his life and his money, nursing for some thirty years his
dream of hard work and perfect satisfaction. Then he died, and a farmer
without his faith and wealth succeeded him, and the hamlet lost its
originality, and became as much like other hamlets as its love of sleep
and pride of birth would allow.

One thing saves it from desertion and extinction. It has a reputation,
over half a county, for being one of the most healthy and
life-prolonging spots in England. It certainly contains a remarkable
number of old men and women, some of whom have come from the neighboring
towns to end their lives in the weather-proof stone cottages and fertile
allotments which remain at this day precisely as they were built and
measured out by the philanthropic squire in the seventeenth century.
Other cottages have been run up in the meantime