zed the tune: and the body
of vocal harmony that it evoked implied a large congregation within, to
whom it was plainly as familiar as it had been to church-goers of a past
generation. With a whimsical sense of regret at the secession of his
once favourite air Somerset moved away, and would have quite withdrawn
from the field had he not at that moment observed two young men with
pitchers of water coming up from a stream hard by, and hastening with
their burdens into the chapel vestry by a side door. Almost as soon as
they had entered they emerged again with empty pitchers, and proceeded
to the stream to fill them as before, an operation which they repeated
several times. Somerset went forward to the stream, and waited till the
young men came out again.

'You are carrying in a great deal of water,' he said, as each dipped his
pitcher.

One of the young men modestly replied, 'Yes: we filled the cistern this
morning; but it leaks, and requires a few pitcherfuls more.'

'Why do you do it?'

'There is to be a baptism, sir.'

Somerset was not sufficiently interested to develop a further
conversation, and observing them in silence till they had again vanished
into the building, he went on his way. Reaching the brow of the hill he
stopped and looked back. The chapel was still in view, and the shades
of night having deepened, the lights shone from the windows yet more
brightly than before. A few steps further would hide them and the
edifice, and all that belonged to it from his sight, possibly for ever.
There was something in the thought which led him to linger. The chapel
had neither beauty, quaintness, nor congeniality to recommend it: the
dissimilitude between the new utilitarianism of the place and the scenes
of venerable Gothic art which had occupied his daylight hours could not
well be exceeded. But Somerset, as has been said, was an instrument
of no narrow gamut: he had a key for other touches than the purely
aesthetic, even on such an excursion as this. His mind was arrested by
the intense and busy energy which must needs belong to an assembly that
required such a glare of light to do its religion by; in the heaving of
that tune there was an earnestness which made him thoughtful, and the
shine of those windows he had characterized as ugly reminded him of the
shining of the good deed in a naughty world. The chapel and its shabby
plot of ground, from which the herbage was all trodden away by busy
feet, had a living hu