g troughs for the sheep there might be many in the fields, and
they might or might not be presided over by servants of the true
Shepherd, but the fold they were not! He grew humble before the Master,
and the Master began to lord it lovingly over him. He sought His
presence, and found Him; began to think less of books and rabbis, yea
even, for the time, of Paul and Apollos and Cephas, and to pore and
ponder over the living tale of the New Covenant; began to feel that the
Lord meant what He said, and that His apostles also meant what He said;
forgot Calvin a good deal, outgrew the influences of Jonathan Edwards,
and began to understand Jesus Christ.

Few sights can be lovelier than that of a man who, having rushed up the
staircase of fame in his youth--what matter whether the fame of a paltry
world, or a paltry sect of that world!--comes slowly, gently, graciously
down in his old age, content to lose that which he never had, and
careful only to be honest at last. It had not been so with Walter Drake.
He had to come down first to begin to get the good of it, but once down,
it was not long ere he began to go up a very different stair indeed. A
change took place in him which turned all aims, all efforts, all
victories of the world, into the merest, most poverty-stricken trifling.
He had been a tarrer and smearer, a marker and shearer of sheep, rather
than a pastor; but now he recognized the rod and leaned on the staff of
the true Shepherd Who feeds both shepherds and sheep. Hearty were the
thanks he offered that he had been staid in his worse than foolish
career.

Since then, he had got into a hollow in the valley, and at this moment,
as he sat in his summer-house, was looking from a verge abrupt into what
seemed a bottomless gulf of humiliation. For his handsome London house,
he had little better than a cottage, in which his study was not a
quarter of the size of the one he had left; he had sold two-thirds of
his books; for three men and four women servants, he had but one old
woman and his own daughter to do the work of the house; for all
quadrupedal menie, he had but a nondescript canine and a contemptuous
feline foundling; from a devoted congregation of comparatively educated
people, he had sunk to one in which there was not a person of higher
standing than a tradesman, and that congregation had now rejected him as
not up to their mark, turning him off to do his best with fifty pounds a
year. He had himself heard the ch