,--your going to sea."

"Does it?" I cried, pitching my cap up in the air in my enthusiasm and
catching it again dexterously, shouting out the while the refrain of the
old song-- "The sea, the sea, a sailor's life for me! Hurrah! Hurrah!"

Father sighed, and resumed his "quarter-deck walk," as mother termed it,
backwards and forwards along the little path under the old elm-tree in
front of the summer-house, with its bare branches stretched out like a
giant's fingers clutching at the sky, always turning when he got up to
the lilac bush and retracing his steps slowly and deliberately, as if
anxious to tread in his former footprints in the very centre of the box-
edged walk.

I think I can see him now: his face, which always had such a bright
genial look when he smiled, and seemed to light up suddenly from within
when he turned to speak to you, wearing a somewhat sad and troubled air,
and a far-away thoughtful expression in his eyes that was generally
there when he was having a mental wrestle with some difficulty, or
trying to solve one of those intricate social problems that were being
continually submitted for his consideration. And yet, at first glance,
a stranger would hardly have taken him to be a clergyman; for he had on
an old brown shooting-jacket very much the worse for wear, and was
smoking one of those long clay pipes that are called "churchwardens,"
discoloured by age and the oil of tobacco, and which he had lit and let
out and relit again half a dozen times at least during our talk.

"Very unorthodox," some critical people will say.

Aye, possibly so; but if these censors only knew father personally, and
saw how he fulfilled his mission of visiting the fatherless and widow in
their affliction, in addition to preaching the gospel and so winning
souls to heaven, and how he was liked and loved by every one in the
parish; perhaps they could condone his "sin of omission" in the matter
of not wearing a proper clerical black coat with a stand-up collar of
Oxford cut and the regulation white tie, and that of "commission" in
smoking such a vulgar thing as a common clay pipe!

Presently, after his second turn as far as the lilac bush and back,
father's face cleared, as if he had worked out the question that had
been puzzling him; for, its anxious expression vanished and his eyes
seemed to smile again.

"I suppose it's a family trait, and runs in the blood," he said. "Your
grandfather,--my father, that is, Al