of the shadow of death at any rate, | be going in and out among them, doing read the service over the graves, and his duty." won the hearts of some of the poor stricken ones by shedding tears at the bedside. The rectory was not a pistolshot off the nearest of the hovels.

"I thought I heard you say, sir, that the rector was half a fool and seventythree years old. Would his going

mend matters much? The shame's not there. Why don't you go yourself? You said you only lived four miles off."

All eyes were turned upon the

One day there was no one moving at the little rectory. Then it was found that the poor curate had fallen sick "the fayver had got him." Next week the poor wife succumbed; he himself stranger. He was evidently a very was in fierce delirium; there was only a girl of fifteen to wait upon the pair, and nobody knew whether either the one or the other had a friend in the world.

By this time the Rampton fever had become a subject of much talk for many miles round. Her Majesty's mail used to change horses at the White Hart. The passengers did not like it, and when one of the hostlers was struck down and died in two days the horses were taken two miles further down the road, and the coach was not allowed to stop at Rampton. But the news of the plague spread all along the road and reached London, and one day a neighboring clergyman, having occasion to go up to London on some business, put up at Wood's Hotel, then, and I believe now, a great place of resort for members of the clerical profession and their families, and he talked much and excitedly of the terrible state of affairs, and, of course, he was very vehement in denouncing it as a burning shame, though how and why it was a shame he didn't explain.

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ugly man to tackle, and there was a strange mocking and defiant smile upon his face which seemed to mean anything except what was pleasant and conciliatory.

"I, sir? You have no right to ask me that question; and certainly not in that insulting tone, sir. I have my own parish and a wife and four little children. I have no business to run the risk

none at all." "Oh, it's the risk, is it? the risk, eh?"

The words were uttered in a deliberate and inexpressibly contemptuous manner, wholly unjustifiable under the circumstances.

A murmur of displeasure, almost of indignation, went round the room. A white-haired and venerable clergyman rose from his seat and passed straight up to the last speaker.

"You are a young man, sir; I assume, too, you are a clergyman. Have you yourself a cure of souls? I think you cannot know what it is to have wife and children. But you are behaving in a very unbecoming way in hurling taunts like these against a stranger, and he, too, a priest of Christ's Church. For shame, sir! For shame ! "

The smile had utterly vanished from

"Why is it a shame ?" said a voice from the other end of the room. The speaker was a dark-haired, close-shaven gentleman in clerical dress. Scarcely above the middle height, with a big the young man's face; he held down head, deep chest, broad shoulders, his head like a penitent child; his eyes enormously long arms almost amount- were bent upon the ground; he uttered ing to a deformity, and a large, mas- not a single word. sive, bony hand, which he rested on the back of a chair after he had somewhat slowly walked up to the other clergyman's table and stood confronting him, waiting for an answer.

Why, it's a shame of the rector, to be sure," said the other, a little disconcerted. "He ought to be there, and

The old clergyman went up to him and laid his hand upon his shoulder. "There, there, my young friend, I did not want to wound you, but you know you deserved the rebuke, and I know you'll forgive me. But - but — yes! I think you'll do more than that, you'll show yourself the man you think an

rest of the biscuits, which were enough | Luke insisted they should always come to have satisfied six harvestmen. to church and give thanks for their re"Now then, Sally, we'll go up-stairs. covery. Only John Barleycorn grumNever do anything on an empty stom-bled, for the tap-room was well-nigh ach, Sally. Fill up the kettle, I'll go deserted, and the people were somehow alone." showing some little gleams of seriousness and self-respect.

"Oh, sir! please, sir! you mustn't go up-stairs; you'll get the fayver, and you're a kind gentleman. You'll get the fayver."

"Sally, you attend to me. Kind or not kind, I'll tell you a secret. I've got a devil in me; and if you don't mind what I say, and do as I tell you, that devil will come out and rend you. If you ever say that word fayver in this house again you shall be tossed into the ditch and have a stake driven through you, and lie there till Judgment Day!" He made his way to the dreadful bedroom. Two emaciated human beings were lying there; one of them tossing about in delirium, the other just stupid with helplessness and despair. His first act was to open every door and window on that first floor. Then he dropped down upon his knees beside the poor woman as she lay, and asked for help that he might help others.

Finally, one morning he abruptly burst out upon poor Mrs. Blackie, who had been whimpering forth her gratitude and protesting that they owed life and health to their benefactor, and so on and so on.

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My good woman, I can't stand this sort of thing. This very day either you go away from this place for three months or I do. It's for you to say. If you'll consult my convenience, you'll go away, both of you, and take Sally with you and stay away till Christmas, and I'll stay here in charge of the parish. There are five-and-twenty pounds to help you. The mail will pass at twelve, and you've got two hours. If I find you here when I get back you'll never see my face after this day at sunset."

He flung himself out of the house in wrath, leaving five bank-notes upon the breakfast-table behind him. On his return early in the afternoon the house was empty. The next thing was to get a poor woman "to do for him." She was a neat and decent person, had been a cook in a gentleman's family, had married late and had lost her husband by the fever, was the mother of two children, and the mistress of a cat.

And so Luke began his work at Rampton. Before a week was over he had more supplies than he knew what to do with. He hired a "trap" and went driving about the country demanding rather than begging for help. The port-wine, the brandy —even the champagne came in by the dozen. Three of the cottages had been vacated, the inmates having fled no one cared whither. Luke treated them as if they were his own - asked no one's leave had them thoroughly cleaned out, scraped, whitewashed, and the doors taken off from the upper floor. Then he had three sets of fever-stricken patients removed into these houses, and treated the next three cottages in the same way. In a fortnight the fever was stamped out. There were no it all was that nobody interfered with fresh cases, and the curate and his him. Little by little, now that the wife were moving about again and sit- fever scare had passed away, the clergy ting out in the sunshine. The mas- and some few of the gentry round terful energy of the man carried all dropped in and called upon him. Once before it. As the patients recovered, a pompous territorial magnate came to

The harvest had been gathered and the odd laborers were turned off. There were several of the men out of work. Luke looked about him and resolved to remodel the garden. He set four or five men at work, and soon there was a transformation scene indeed. He made new walks, even cut down a tree or two, levelled a new lawn and cleared out the pond. The strange feature in

bodies and souls, had passed away. The church, to be sure, had become a wholly different place on Sundays; there were a couple of hundred of the farmers and poor people who were now regular attendants, and there was no doubt that a very great change had come upon the parish. But "what's bred in the bone will come out in the flesh," and there was a villainous set among the younger men, whose fathers and grandfathers had been poachers

days.

been, but there were always six or eight of the "blacks," who got back to their old quarters by the fireside in the long evenings, and there was noise and quarrelling as of yore, and occasionally something worse.

pay his respects. Luke was in the | had seemed to them a special 'Vangelist garden ordering his men, and was slow sent down from heaven to save their to invite the great J.P. to walk in. Accustomed to treat people de haut en bas, the visitor was irritated by Luke's fearless and almost aggressive independence. For no man ever patronized him a second time; once was quite enough to try that experiment. What passed between the two will never be known, but the squire went off like Naaman in a rage. "Confound the fellow ! He as much as told me to mind my own business, and he smiled at me as if he'd been a prizefighter and sometimes sheep-stealers in the old stepping into the ring. Who is he? where does he come from?" It was The White Hart had begun to fill suggested that he was a Cornishman, again. It was nothing like what it had of a good Cornish family, with a comfortable little independence; that he had been a scholar of St. John's College, Oxbridge; might have won a fellowship, but that he had some cranky notions about the way a man ought to read; preferred Plutarch to Plato, and wasted two whole terms in a vain attempt to translate Cassiodorus and reconstruct the text of that barbarian writer. In course of time he had taken orders; but he could not respect his rector, and one day he smiled at him. The rupture was inevitable; he retired to a small patrimony which was heavily mortgaged, lived like a hermit on less than a pound a week, and at the end of three years had paid off fifteen hundred pounds of incumbrances which had been borrowed for some reason or other at six per cent. Then he had taken another curacy, this time with a really holy and devoted clergyman, whose influence had changed the whole current of his life. One morning his friend was discovered dead in his bed, and Luke found himself "with a loose end" and quite bewildered by his loss. He had come up to town resolved on taking a London curacy, when he found himself that evening at Wood's Hotel, and four months had passed since then and the winter was drawing near.

The spasms of conscientiousness which had twitched and wrung the hearts of the Rampton folk while death was knocking at their doors, and Luke

Luke was vexed, but he knew it must come to this sooner or later. He went boldly to John Barleycorn and remon|strated with him for keeping the house open all night, and suggested, with a hint, that just possibly it might be to his advantage to close at eleven. The man was sulky and insolent. "Close at eleven? What for? Supposing I did close at eleven. I tell 'ee whatsome on 'em 'd come and knock at the rectory door, the' would, and ast what you'd done wi' all that there port wine as Squire Barclay sent in for 'em when they was down wi' the fayver. I tell 'ee they know as well as you who that there wine belongs to." Luke was stung as if an adder had struck him. But he bit his lip, said not a word, passed out of the house, came back for one brief moment, stared hard at the landlord, then with that accursed smile upon his face he said slowly: "John Barleycorn, you're a cunning man; but you cunning fellows are often a trifle too sharp. So it was you put that into their heads, was it?"

The fellow was cowed and shambled back into his parlor and sat down trembling. When he recovered his speech again he mumbled gruffly to the little

knot of boosers: "Blessed if I don't think that blooming parson's got the evil eye. He'd ought to be swum for a witch."

one knows where that du come from. He's a artful 'un!"

The moon

and found it much later than he had thought. He had scarcely turned homeward when, in a turn of the road, he came full upon a little band of five men, one of whom he immediately recognized as a parishioner, with no very good character to boast of, even among the "blacks."

December was half done. was at its full; it was a glorious night. Alas! John Barleycorn had got the Luke started out for a midnight walk. ear of the bad set again, but they did Tempted by the deep quiet, and the not let him into all their secrets. Luke splendor of the moon paling all the went on in the old way, taking his stars, and the crisp firm road that the lonely walks mostly in the late after- frost had made hard as adamant under noons, and sometimes in the moonlight his feet, Luke walked on and on, till nights. In the daytime he was always he found himself some seven miles busying himself about some parish from home. He looked at his watch, matter the dame's school for there was no other—the night school for the lads, whom he taught himself; visiting among the old people, who dearly loved him, and as often as not pulling out a short, blackened clay pipe - there were no "briars" in those days-and after handing a big, hairy pouch to some old gossip, whose eyes twinkled at the sight of it, filling up himself and smok-at this time of night ?” ing voluminously. There was a poor little club-footed boy who lived with his old grandparents, and who could neither read nor write. The hovel in which those three lived was a long way off the rectory, and the boy could not get as far as the night school. So Luke took it into his head to teach the little cripple with the grandfather looking on. The boy, as time went on, grew up into a rather thoughtful man, who had many stories to tell of his first and only teacher, as thus:

"Grandfather said as the 'Wangelist was the first parson as he ever heard tell on who was a teetotaler, and the first as ever smoked a short pipe, and the first as ever slopped hisself, in a grit thing as they called a shower, reg'lar every morning, and the first as preached all out of his own head, and the first as knowed the Bible and Prayer Book by heart, every word.”

John Barleycorn sneered at it all. "What call's he got to wash hisself in that there thing like a Punch and Judy show? And then that there pipe

- why ain't it wore up afore now? They say he smokes all day and all night, and yet there's no one never see him smoking in what you may call the open air. I don't hold wi' they secret ways. That may be real 'bacca, but no

"Why, George, what are you up to

The moment the words had escaped him he felt he had made a mistake. The fellows all joined in a rough laugh, and one of them answered brutally: "We're a-going to a prayer-meeting, we are, and we'll take you with us if you loike. You've been a-setting snares, I'll bet, Mister. Passous hadn't ought to du sich things. Yow go your gate, and we'll go ourn."

Luke seldom hesitated, but he did hesitate now; and, as they marched on and passed him, he could not see what the right course was, and he continued his homeward walk, very uncomfortable, and angry with himself at his awkwardness and stupidity.

Next morning Rampton was all astir. A party of poachers had been set upon in Squire Gorman's spinney, and three of them had been cleverly captured by a large band of keepers. The other two had made off, and no one knew who these two were, or where they had come from. The three were all Rampton men. Who were the other two? A day or two afterwards Luke came upon George Cannell and another. As they passed him he looked at them both with that terrible smile, but they took no more notice of him than if he had been a clod of mud by the wayside.

Who was that other? He was the