unds annually, and the
number of his parishioners all told, men, women, and children, was, as
nearly as may be, two hundred. He had been at Marston-Cocking for
thirty-five years. He came just after his wife died--how he hardly
knew. The living was offered him; he thought the change would do him
good, although he did not intend to remain; but there he had stayed,
and there was no chance of his removal. He was completely out of the
world, troubled himself with no church controversies, and preached
little short sermons telling his congregation not to tell lies nor be
unkind to one another. Every now and then he introduced into his
discourses his one favourite subject, astronomy, and by degrees the
labourers in Marston-Cocking knew more about the sky and its daily and
nightly changes than many a highly educated person in the city. Mr.
Armstrong, otherwise a very plain, simple creature, always grew
eloquent on the common ignorance of the heavens. "Here," he would say,
"has God thrust upon us these marvellous sights. These are not the
secrets hidden in the mine--they are forced upon us; and yet we walk
with our heads to the earth; we do not know the morning star when we
see it, nor can we even recognise the Pleiads and Arcturus which Job
knew." Mr. Armstrong had made all his instruments with his own hands,
and had even used the top of the church-tower as an observatory. Mrs.
Bullen, the wife of the one farmer in the parish, a lady who wrote the
finest of Italian pointed hands, who had been in a Brighton
boarding-school for ten years, and had been through "Keith on the Use
of the Globes," was much scandalised at this "appropriation of the
sacred edifice to secular purposes," as she called it, but she met with
no encouragement. The poor people somehow connected heaven with the
stars, and Mr. Armstrong never undeceived them, so that they saw
nothing improper in the big telescope under the weathercock.

"Really, James," said Mrs. Bullen one morning to Mr. Armstrong's
gardener and general man-of-all-work as he was carrying a chair from
the house into the tower, "do you think this is quite right? Do you
think our Saviour would have sanctioned the erection of a profane
instrument over the house of prayer?"

James was very thick-headed, and hardly knew the meaning of these long
words, bat he did not like Mrs. Bullen, and he resented her talking to
him, a servant, in that strain about his master.

"Ah! Mrs. Bullen, you