vicar hastily summoned the
village doctor, who had not yet left the church. They lifted him, and
laid him along on the cushioned step where he had been kneeling, but
motion and breath were gone, the strong arms were helpless, and the
colour had left the open face. Taken at once from the heavenly Feast on
earth to the glory above, could this be called sudden death?

There he lay on the altar step, with hands crossed on his breast, and
perfectly blessed repose on his manly countenance, sweetened and ennobled
in its stillness, and in every lineament bearing the impress of that Holy
Spirit of love who had made it a meet temple.

What an unpremeditated lying in state was that! as by ones and twos,
beneath the clergyman's eye, the villagers stole in with slowly, heavily
falling tread to gaze in silent awe on their best friend, some sobbing
and weeping beyond control, others with grave, almost stolid
tranquillity, or the murmured 'He _was_ a gentleman,' which, in a poor
man's mouth, means 'he was a just man and patient, the friend of the weak
and poor.' His farmers and his own labourers put their shoulders to bear
him once more to his own house, through his half-gathered crops--

The hand of the reaper
Takes the ears that are hoary,
But the voice of the weeper
Wails manhood in glory.

No, bewail him not. It was glory, indeed, but the glory of early autumn,
the garnering of the shock of corn in full season. It was well done of
the vicar that a few long, full-grained ears of wheat were all that was
laid upon his breast in his coffin.

There Honora saw them. The vicar, Mr. Henderson, had written to her at
once, as Humfrey had long ago charged him to do, enclosing a letter that
he had left with him for the purpose, a tender, soothing farewell, and an
avowal such as he could never have spoken of the blessing that his
attachment to her had been, in drawing his mind from the narrowness to
which he might have been liable, and in elevating the tone of his views
and opinions.

She knew what he meant--it was what he had caught from her youthful
enthusiasm, second-hand from Owen Sandbrook. Oh! what vivid, vigorous
truth not to have been weakened in the transit through two such natures,
but to have done its work in the strong, practical mind able and candid
enough to adopt it even thus filtered!

There were a few words of affectionate commendation of his people and his
land into her keeping, and a par