acted
decisively, pinning Annie by her terror to agree to a permanent
alteration in affairs. As soon as Ishmael could be moved--for the fit he
had had left him weak and nervous--the Parson took him to the Vicarage,
and there for the next three or four years, till he went to St. Renny,
Ishmael made his home.

They were, he realised much later, the happiest years of his life.
Looking back on them, he grudged his unconsciousness of the fact at the
time. There is nothing in the world quite like the atmosphere of an
old-fashioned English parsonage--the quietness, the well-bred but simple
air of it, with a tang of scholarly mustiness, the whole of a fragrance
never entirely lost to those who have known it intimately. Something of
the spirit of George Herbert, that homely gentleman of unassuming
saintliness, the epitome of everything that was best and most
characteristic in the Anglican Church, has descended on country
parsonages ever since and is only now beginning to wear thin. And it was
the Church of Herbert, of Jeremy Taylor, of Traherne--how above all he
would have loved the works of Traherne if they had then been
discovered!--that Boase represented. A Church domestic, so to speak,
with priestly powers, but wielded as the common laws of a household. The
widening ripples of the Oxford Movement had touched even the West with
its spreading circle, but though it had his respect it left him
curiously unstirred. Its doctrines were his already, perhaps with a
wider interpretation here and there; and for ritual, except in so far
that he liked everything done decently, he had no feeling. His sense of
religion was profound but simple, as simple as daily bread. He held that
it should be allowed to become part of a child as unforcedly as air or
food, and he had an especial horror of what are known as heart-to-heart
talks. Above all he abominated revivals, he knew too much of the greater
apathy that welled in their hysterical wake. Wesley, he held, had had a
mission, which is a very different thing.

Therefore the Parson's first care with Ishmael was to sweep him as bare
of all thought as might be. He even stopped him when the child, still
conscience-ridden, would have poured out exaggerations of misdoings,
though he registered the knowledge he guessed at for future guidance. It
was against Ishmael's nature to be expansive, and if he had been so on
that occasion he would probably never have felt so easy with the Parson
again. As i