e height of its effervescence. A note from Mrs. Widesworth
supplied me with the needed excuse. The singing-school was to hold its
semiannual meeting at her house on Thursday next; would I not come down
for a day and meet many old friends?

II.

The fragrance of perfected harvests pervaded Foxden. The air was full of
those sweet remembrances of summer which are better than her radiant
presence. The sky overhead was flooded with rich autumnal sunshine. Far
to the north lay glimmering a heavy bank of clouds. There might be rain
before night.

I entered the familiar parsonage and inquired for its occupant. He had
walked to the end of the garden with Miss Hurribattle, who had been with
him for some hours. I was at liberty to await his return in a depressing
theological lumber-room, called the study. The First Church had
liberally supplied its former ministers with the current literature of
their craft. Current literature! are not the words a mockery? could they
ever have applied to those printed petrifactions? One would sooner look
for vitality among the frozen denizens of the Morgue on St. Bernard! Yet
I doubt if these stately authors, wrapped in the cerements of their
prosiness, may reasonably reproach a forgetful world. They ministered to
the wants of _their_ present, and by so doing were privileged to fashion
a future which they might not enter and possess. Complain indeed! Why,
their progeny had a good ten, twenty, or fifty years' life of it, as the
case might be,--and here about us are men of greater enterprise and
grasp doomed to work off paragraphs that perish on the day of printing.
Well, no earnest soul can fail to modify the character of his age, and
thus of all ages. So, if our generation demands ministry in newspapers
instead of folios, a man may still win an honest immortality without the
biography and the bother of it.

I looked up from the books to see the clergyman part with Miss
Hurribattle at the gate, and then turn his steps towards the house.

There was something like embarrassment as we exchanged greetings, yet
there was hardly time to mark this before it had passed.

"Ah, Heaven!" exclaimed Clifton, passionately, "how I envy that woman's
faith in the omnipotence of a trifle! Suppose you or I can attain a
judicial largeness of view, is it any compensation for that intense glow
of the sympathies as they crowd into one specious channel? Why this
man's yearning after intellectual satisfaction, when