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Well, then, it's meself must acquaint you. Sure 'twas just seeing the china pots and jars and playimages all arranged so neat and orderly when he knew, did that bull, Sir, that they were all breakable, and that the butter would melt in their mouths. 'Twas then original sin took hold of that intelligent bull, Sir: and-I tell ye, doctor, his evil communications corrupted their good manners for this world and for that which is to come!"

"Unless I am mistaken, I apprehend your analogies are imperfect, friend Finnigan, and your metaphors confused."

"And d'ye think I am not aware of that same: there's nothing in the whole world so convincing as that same confusion; and 'twas me friend the bull who made the remark as he carefully backed out of the shop because of his bleeding horns!"

'Well, well, well! If the broken shards stand for the shattered virtues that shriek through Man's Dilapidated Soul-'

"Doctor, take a pull!" interrupted the clergyman offering his flask. I tell you, Sir-I can not enter a lady's withdrawing room, without feeling it my duty to untidy it—to set all her pictures hanging askew and her statues on their heads, and her roses with their legs standing up-and, odds bodkins, Sir, something indelicate!-out of their vases, and even her chaste harp unstrung. 'Tis these things that belie the divinity within the soul of her and label it original sin! So up crops that same when she's looking the other way— and then, like enough, she's lampooned all over the town for it!"

This much is true, Parson," said the physician reprovingly, for his wisdom had been fortified, "that I conceive you don't know what you're arguing aboutexcept that you are plaguy discontented with your own efforts in the matter of the forbidden emoluments of your theological Eden."

But now they reached the parsonage.

Lady Evangeline was there in her element. Her birth, her gentleness, her habit, gave her authority over the physician, chaplain and even the jealous Martha. The boys accepted her plea of fatigue and gladly pursued their adventure with Mr. Finnigan. They were keen to investigate the mermaid myth, which Mr. Finnigan had worked up with such romantic appurtenances that they could not wholly discredit what they wanted to believe.

Dr. Ralph promised not to bleed the patient without first advising her ladyship of the necessity. But he wished to see the patient alone, and so went up the stair.

"He du be desperate bad, my lady," said Martha. "An' have been worsenin' this many a day, since ever that overseer come and tooken away his nineteen lambs to slaughter. If us wants to see unself again, 'tis the flock must be broft to home again!"

WHE

CHAPTER XXII

HELL'S BUBBLE

HEN Mr. Trevenna passed through the North Door out into the snowstorm-such a snowstorm as none remembered in Cornwall-he felt his whole being aglow. And yet the vision of his lady with her arms about the motherless child had brought before him another and a very terrible; that of his children driven into slavery. He saw them harried by redtongued dogs, caught and torn, then left to die.

For on the previous day a gaunt man, one Jan Tonkyn, and his wife with a starving baby at the breast had come to him from Week St. John, a big village where, six months before, the mine that had been their sole support, had been knocked, because no longer profitable. The suffering had been terrible and now fever and dysentery were hastening the work of extermination. No public effort was or could be then made to cope with such wholesale disasters, and often an inland village, a single street of granite cottages without church or legal status, was gradually abandoned, its people scattered or dead, its homes but mementos of misery. These three had come to him in a grief greater than that for the baby's refusal to thrive upon chewed raw turnips; for their three elder children, Sammy, Nan and Abey, rescued for a while by a poor grandmother in Tamerhill, had drifted into its poorhouse, and now were apprenticed, they learned, in foreign parts.

The mother had displayed a black bruise in her shrivelled breast where Hoblyn had struck her for her

importunate inquiry, and when this could not silence her, he had referred her to Mr. Trevenna. Martha soon had the three within doors and feeding; she would have kept the mother and baby, but that the man had been promised a job and their luck might have turned. Honest through all the terrible time of starvation, the father had at last stolen turnips and was only now out of prison. The one thing that had seemed of utmost importance had been the holding together of the Home, the altar of love and creation and sacrifice, as Mr. Trevenna named it. And now as the woman fed her baby with milk and water from a spoon and the man devoured wolfishly the cold fish and bread and cider set before them, Mr. Trevenna let his anger instruct him: he knew that, whatever the cost might be, he must find Sammy and Nan and Abey.

So now as he left the church his horizon was clear. Either eternal war was always raging between essential Evil and omnipotent Love, the warfare not being yet accomplished, either that or consuming Horror lay at the heart of the universe. For him there was never more any doubt; he had seen and he knew. Hereafter he must leave his church always by the North Door.

And now in this snowstorm, with only his cassock for protection, he set out North-east across the bare down, upwards to the granite-strewn moor.

What next happened is not very clear. It is probable that he forgot his dinner, and spent the afternoon visiting some distant cottages from which children had been sent to the poorhouse.

The storm had abated when at last he started for home with two sacks he had borrowed, one over his head and one tied across his shoulders. Half starved, his weakness almost overwhelmed him as he took a short cut to his home. That he should lose his way over ground he knew as well as his own churchyard was not surprising. The storm had swept out of recognition

everything but the undulations of the land; and these had vanished after sunset. He remembered afterwards a certain exaltation in having lost himself, and in being therefore on the way to find something better. He knew he was sleepy with the cold and must keep moving or he would never find some thing he needed so desperately.

Suddenly he awoke from an aggressive dreaminess to full recognition of the danger he was in. Though he was but a mile or two from home, he felt the hopelessness of trudging further in the deep snow; and it was still falling large and thick.

His imagination became dominant. He was travelling in Dante's frozen marsh of Cocytus, encompassed by the Ring of Traitors. All about his feet he saw upturned faces, half buried in the snow, cruel, relentless, yet with looks most pitiful. Yet, turning away from them, a sense of warmth filled his inmost being; the sense of death with its adventure instilled a new courage.

He came to the half-door of a smithy, and leaned his arms upon it the better to watch the fire roaring on the granite hearth. A half-naked man stood by the forge. His skin was red like the fire he roused with his bellows, and black-hairy. His face was the demon's over St. Neot's North Door: its beak-like nose, protruding eyes, its pointed ears, the left lopping forwards, and its snarl left no room for doubt.

The blacksmith turned to him:

"I suppose, like most others, you are compound of the four elements, Parson?"

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Yes, sure," said Mr. Trevenna, "but by grace of the Spirit."

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Then why are you skeered at my forge?"

Nay, but that I am not!

"Then come you in and have a bite with me! I watched ye the other day, building up of your crack

1 Vide Appendix S.

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