uplifted in prayer. In front of the great tooth-set mouth is a hand-whose it may be I cannot discover; but in its grasp is a measuring yard, as if setting limits to the power of those awful jaws. May they not stand for the law? while there be that in our first parents which one day shall be above the law'? My good friend, Dr. Borlase of Ludgvan, was one of the first to uncover these rude specimens of art in his church-in 1740, I think. He found a fine St. Christopher like my own; but he has missed altogether their true significancy, when he names them fooleries that deserve no place in the House of God.' What must he think of our mermaid with the cherished pilchard in her arms ? But to return to my turtles. Farmer Hornbuckle is set upon his Charity's wedding Master Daniel Hoblyn; for he, though fallen in fortune, is accounted the better man for his family and its pristine prosperity. His family belongs by right to the landed gentry, though dissipation reduced them to yeoman-level: but now, though landless save for a ruined house named Skeleton Priory by the vulgar, he is acquiring wealth again. Some years ago, while still very poor he opened a shop in Tamerhill, the first of its kind. Here you may buy all the cheap mill-spun fabrics that are making our cottage spinning unprofitable, and our looms idle. And now this war comes following a bad harvest of both crops and pilchards, and almost stops the smuggling. Yet against this distress, come brave tales of the water-mills in the North-of which also you yourself have informed me-where children's hands control iron monsters of spinning-mules, and thus, with good food and instruction, multiply God's works. It is to such mills Hoblyn will take my flock of children, though the distance seems terrible. But it will be only for a 53. 1 Vide Journal of the Royal Institute of Cornwall, Vol. IV, p. while; for after two years each child will come home again, fat and well taught and with money to heap into his mother's lap. I liked not the fellow's monstrous grin, as he uttered this consolation for the departure of my flock, now close at hand. It so happens that quite recently I had a letter from your Uncle Fakenham in which he refers to these wonderful changes in our manufactories. He assures me the children are godly entreated. He has knowledge of these matters firsthand in that many mills are springing up on the hillsides of his property wherever mountain torrent can fall upon a wheel. "Yours, deo volente, ever gratefully, "C. T. "P.S. Little Genny had been disobedient and, when Charity's back was turned, ventured to extort from our oldest goat yet more milk than already yielded. Nanny attacked the child with the horny pitchfork planted by her Creator in place of a crown, and the child had been badly punished but for Charity's intervention. At dinner the signs of tears were manifest. She sat with her portion before her unable to begin eating and with her little fists clenched upon something within them. 'What's the matter, Genny?' I asked, going up to her. She opened her hands and gave me to smell of their contents. They were full of wild thyme. Shall I take care of it for you, Genny? It's just heavenly thyme ; but now it's dinner-time!' Then she gave heart and hand to her fried pilchard, attacking it as religiously from tail upwards as if she were a marauding dog-fish gorging on a pilchard with head tight gripped in the drift seine. 'Tis unlucky, they all believe, to eat a pilchard in any way than from the tail forwards! "So, dear my Lady, wilt thou please turn this rhyme of mine into thy most stately of heroic couplets? 'Wild thyme and tame time "I do believe the angels play ball with the stars betimes, and that one who dwells upon earth does find recreation in a game of ball with her reverend and dear Sir, and claps her hands in delight when perchance he casts across those three hundred miles of playground a gay soap-bubble, even when it prove but emptiness in her brave hands!" CHAPTER IX LADY EVANGELINE'S HUSBAND THE of is on HE friendship of Lady Evangeline Walrond with an obscure Cornish clergyman was certainly peculiar. Had its story been current in the town, it could not have failed to excite comment. While there was nothing to conceal, there was nothing that could be published without misnaming. In Mullinstow, Martha, not curious of her master's correspondents, had no gossip to carry. In London, not even the Major, until a little before his disappearance, realized how much this correspondence meant to his wife; and then he misconstrued it. Occasionally and in the earlier years, she would try to interest him in Mr. Trevenna's letters; but he would always yawn at them, curse his stars that he had married a blue-stocking, ask her if her Abelard was that fancy methody who hob-a-nobbed with smugglers and Frenchmen, and end by ordering her to put a term to her correspondence with the little Jacobite hedge-parson. Major Reginald Walrond was not literary he vowed he could spell no better than a gentleman need, that it was a penance to decipher handwriting, and that sentimental balderdash turned his gizzard. But although Lady Evangeline obeyed her husband in every possible way, the possible had its limits. Even if matrimony, as she often thought, was devised for a Purgatory, it could not be intended for a Hell. Very early in their unhappiness she claimed her freedom either in certain things or in all things; he might choose! And her father, without whose generosity the Major's home would have been sold up along with his commission, was ready to support her in these claims. So the Major submitted, adored his wife, and harboured no real jealousy. Once when his wife's eldest brother had thought fit to rally him, he had exclaimed, "Me, jealous of a queasy, hollow-paunched jesuitical puritan!" and with such contempt that the subject was never again opened. But sometimes he secretly wondered if it was too late to learn spelling. Lady Evangeline writes from Golden Square on November 16th, 1793, as follows: REVEREND AND MY DEAR SIR, "The deeper our friendship's roots penetrate the soil for nurture, the better I realize the pricelessness of Heaven's gifts. Beneath that tree's umbrageous foliage my tasks and duties become easy-indeed often happy; and ever spreads more widely the sheltering tree. "How truly you quote to me those words, whose source in Ecclesiastes, I have found after much searching: He hath placed the world in man's heart!' Dr. Goldsmith, I think, has boldly put the same thought thus, if my memory deceives me not: Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!' It is a most felicitous text, I vow. But more than this not only does your humble friend perceive how big a world Heaven has planted in the heart of St. Neot's minister but, as if by some Arabian magick, if not divine miracle, you have transported into my heart that Cornish world of riven rocks and cruel storms with its joys and griefs, compassions and rages. You give me also close intimacy with your friends-poor old Doctor Ralph and his dead self; the monstrous over |