I was bruised in the wars, and twenty years of Summerdale is no more than a week in the world. How they talk, these crushed friends of my youth. Their metaphors are often as confused as their stories. Cardinal Perron might have found in them materials for another treatise. One man is full of Scylla and Charybdis, turning the fight into a naval encounter instead of a war on land; another talks of Arges, Brontes, and Steropes; another of Pluto and Mammon; another of Satan and the fiends; another of Fortuna and Fate, and Scylla and Charybdis, all in a breath. Circe is on some lips, and I listen to stories of the Grand Passion with a heart whose beating is quickened by my own never-to-be-forgotten memories.

Lately there came to me two men who had been maimed and lamed in the financial storm which raged in the great world. I knew it had been; for I saw accounts of social wrecks and disasters in the Times. I had read notices of the panic, and had been called upon to describe to the best of my knowledge what a panic was. My little handful of parishioners had heard that there was a panic in London, and there had been a serious discussion among them as to the nature of the beast. Arthur Masters knew what the panic was. He was the first of my two friends who hunted me up after the storm. He had been educated for the Church, but he was always fond of figures; he was great in arithmetical calculations, had notions about the currency, and finally, instead of digging and delving into the mysteries of theology, he plunged into finance. Two years ago he was worth a hundred thousand pounds; a week since, when he sat by my side at Summerdale, he was not worth as many pence. Had he been content with a hundred thousand pounds, he might have possessed that vast sum now. He wanted two hundred thousand, and he is ruined. He confessed it all to me. He had fought for too much, and now he is gray and short of breath, and seeks for the rest that will not come.

He never sought me when he was victorious; but I do not tell him this. He has been forced aside into the byway of life, and that is how he finds me out. I remember him when he was a bright curly-headed fellow, the pride of a fond mother, and the admiration of a host of pretty girls. When I fell in the fight and was pushed aside, I saw his brougham driving down to the House of Commons. At least, I think I saw it; but the time wears out so rapidly, and Summerdale is fruitful in fancies. Masters thought he would like the old village-my slumbering Valley of Poppies. The crumbling stocks beneath the elms and the daws up in the church

tower had a special attraction for him. But he was only resting awhile. The air was grateful to his dazed brain, and the homely food restored the tone of both mind and body. In a week he stood erect, and then he longed, as I did years ago, to be once more in the fight. To-day he writes to me and encloses what he calls the draft of a prospectus for a new Limited Company. I hardly know what he means. I suppose it is a new invention for some deadly engine to operate in the City. Should he retrieve his position, I shall hear from him again, and then see him no more. If he falls, I shall encounter him outside the world, hunting me up.

Some of my old friends drop in upon me out of gratitude. They have been saved at a critical time. A "mutual friend" has stepped in with his shield at the proper moment. The hard-pressed soldier has regained his footing; and then all at once the old times, the old faces, the familiar names, come back to the memory. Desprey is one of these men. He hunted me up three years ago; he came in a hired conveyance from the Barwood Junction, six miles away. The villagers flocked out of their houses to see him alight, and treated the driver to a mug of beer to learn the news. I hardly remembered Desprey at first; his voice sounded like a half-forgotten memory; and then all at once I knew him well. His explanation was brief. He was in the neighbourhood, and could not resist the temptation to call and see me; heard quite by accident that I was Perpetual Curate of Summerdale, and felt ashamed of himself that he had never looked me up before. "The fact was, he had been so much engaged one way and another, had had so many irons in the fire, and all that sort of thing, that he had not had a day to call his own for years."

I could see at once that Desprey had not been much hurt. There was music in his voice, his head was erect, and he smiled without effort. "Surely," I thought in my shambling way, "surely this is a victorious man, come to see me in the day of his triumph." I began mentally to chide myself for being cynical about successful men. "Here is Wealth and Success," I thought, "come at last to shake hands with Failure and Poverty for the sake of past days, on the pure score of friendship," and I thanked heaven that it was so. I hope it may be so still, though I feel assured Desprey came out of gratitude. He had been down on his side; the foe was pressing heavily upon him. In another moment he would have been smitten unto death; and then the friendly shield had come, the friendly shield had shadowed him, the friendly life had been risked to save him. This had roused his better nature, this had excited his old love.

Memories of the past had come rushing upon him like a rebuke; and so he had come to see his old friend, and talk of the spring-time of life in the parson's autumn days. And it was so; for when the evening sun had set, and the mists had risen upon the bosom of the river, I lighted my lamp only to see it obscured in the smoke of Desprey's cigar, as he told me of his escape.

"It was at the height of the panic," he said; "I had fifty thousand pounds' worth of certain shares lying with a margin, as we call it, at a great discount house. I had been hit in other ways, and had been compelled to deposit this scrip. Suddenly the shares fell; and I had notice that, unless I could cover them with ten thousand pounds by ten o'clock the next day, they would be sent into the market and sold. This simply meant utter ruin. I could not at so short a notice find even two thousand pounds. I had money, but it was not available. What could I do? I was a candidate for Barford, you know, at the time; put up to succeed old Peters when he died. That night I was to address the electors. I did not know what in the world to do. I felt that I was a ruined man, almost bankrupt in purse and in reputation, for the one would have gone with the other. I was paralysed, thought of my wife and children, of the girls at school, the pleasant country seat. I nearly went mad. Going down to the club I met Frank Somers; you know Frank"

Here Desprey's face lighted up quite joyously, and I remembered Frank as the stroke-oar of our boat at Oxford.

"Yes, I remember Frank," I said; "just remember him." "Ah, he is a fine fellow," said Desprey, continuing his story. "I met him on the Carlton steps, just going into the club. He shook hands, said how pale I looked, asked me if I was ill, and hoped nothing had happened. In my despair I told him, as men will tell each other at such times, how I had been hit, and what a fix I was in. 'Ten thousand!' he repeated to himself; it is a heavy sum, but I think I can manage it for you.' I hardly knew what to think of his remark. He thought he could manage it for me! Why should he manage it for me? I had never had a business transaction with him in my life. While I was wondering at his friendly words, he said he would go and see a friend in Pall Mall, and join me again in half an hour with an answer upon the subject. I went into the club; I looked vacantly at the papers; I looked at the list of bankrupts, half expecting, with my panic-stricken ideas, to see my own name there. I read a case of suicide, and regretted that I was a married man. half an hour Frank Somers came back. 'You can have the money at ten o'clock to-morrow morning,' he said; and now be off to

In

Barford, or else you will lose the train.' I could make no reply. I leaned my head against the wall, and cried like a child."

And he wept-aye, and sobbed, as he told me the story. Little as I can sympathise now with the outside battle (because I have nearly ceased to understand it), I wept too. Thank God, there is some good left in the world still, and there are grateful hearts. Not that I long to be in the world again; it is no place for me. I am content to hear of it, and to give drink to the wayfarers who have fallen out of the lists for a time, or who have left them, like myself, for ever and

ever.

I have a companion while I write a newspaper man. Strange people, these men who write and publish; these men who undertake to instruct mankind! His stories are full of romance and of wonder to me. Stories with princes, and lords, and dukes, and actors, and artists, and beggars in them; stories of failure and success strangely commingled. I can hardly believe that I, the Perpetual Curate of Summerdale-in-the-Water, ever lived in this world of which the journalist speaks. How strange it sounds, his history of personal encounters, of political strife, of literary rivalry, of theological chaos, of High-Church and Low-Church, and Broad-Church and No-Church! Is my friend rehearsing his notes for a new work to rival "Gulliver's Travels"? Is he airing his imagination for an appendix to the "Arabian Nights"? Surely he has been reading "Bidpai," and is amusing himself at my expense. I am convinced that he is treating

me now and then to an extract from "Gil Blas." There is such devilry in his accounts of pit-falls and snares in life's highway, satanic engines hidden in the battle-fields, that I think of Quarles and his Emblems, then turn to Job, and finally to the Man of many sorrows, challenging in my own mind any soldier of this lower world to match Him in His troubles and persecutions.

When the stars are twinkling in the river, and the waters are going on and on, gently down to the sea, I look out into the quiet night, and am content to leave others to bear the cross in show and glitter, in pomp of deanery and bishopric; content to let them have their chariots and their horsemen and their fat servitors; content to be outside the world in this moss-grown Summerdale; content to be the pastor, and master, and doctor, and friend, and instructor of these poor people, living on the borders of life, journeying with the fathers of the village to the "silent land," where

"The wicked cease from troubling,

And the weary are at rest."

CHAPTER III.

THE DEAN'S YOUNGEST DAUGHTER.

THE visits of Masters and Desprey and the journalist, Ernest Fenton, have given my thoughts a vast fillip. Desprey was a boy when I was a boy, and we both went to the same school in the shadow of Wulstan Cathedral.

I see the gray walls of the old houses in the College Green. If the monks of old knew how to pass their days in quiet on the margins of pleasant rivers, their successors of the more modern faith have not failed to catch some of the olden inspiration. You could never have imagined the comforts of those plain looking houses round the square. Their exterior architecture seemed designed to repudiate the idea of ease and luxury and pomp. They were apparently all back doors and back yards, shaded by tall-spreading elms. You rarely saw any one go in or come out. Wherever you entered them, you always got a glimpse of the larder or the kitchen first. And how clean, and sweet, and wholesome, and English everything was. The bright open fireplace and the ancient spit; the clean white flags and great oaken dressers, with rows of white and copper pans.

When I was a boy, the interiors of those dark gray houses in the square were among my dreams. Desprey, who was a grand sort of boy in his way, laughed at the idea of there being any mystery about those houses. He only thought they were dull stupid places, and he would be very sorry to live in one of them. My father said Desprey was made to see things in a different light to my view of the world. He was a thoughtful man, my father, with the highest feeling for his art. It has often puzzled me how he came to let the canker of a narrow out-of-the-world town eat into his judgment; though for that matter I have at last come to love the sublime profession of the Church, finding in it the only solace and comfort, the supremest calm and contentment of heart and soul and mind that man can hope to experience this side the grave.

Those old houses in the square, I have seen the elms whispering together over them, and heard the crows telling each other the history of the Deanery, with its quaint mullioned windows, and its smooth lawn of velvet grass. It was built of red sandstone, the Deanery, and it had a frontage to the river. You could see it from the windows of our school. When you had been kept in for an hour for inattention to your studies, and all the other boys were gone, you