The Farringdons

not with sou

e snares their

pitfall w

s were ma

ong the summit of this ridge runs the High Street of the bleak little town of Sedgehill; so that the houses on the east side of this street see nothing through their back windows save the huge slag-mounds and blazing furnaces and tall chimneys of the weird and terrible, yet withal fascinating, Bl

e works were the Farringdons, and had been so for several generations. So it came to pass that the Farringdons were the royal family of Sedgehill; and the Osierfield Works was the circle wherein the inhabi

topped in front of a large square house built of gray stone. It was a handsome house inside, with wonderful oak staircases and Adams chimneypieces; and there was an air of great stateliness about it, and of very little luxury. For the Farringdons were a hardy race,

nable attribute of all state churches. In the eyes of Sedgehill it was as necessary to salvation to pray at the chapel as to work at the Osierfield; and the majority of the inhabitan

hose sources of interest, and had no patience for any one who did, the two did not always see eye to eye. Perhaps if Maria had been more unbending, things might have turned out differently; but Methodism in its severest aspects was not more severe than Maria Farringdon. She was a thorough gentlewoman, and extremely clever; but tenderness was not counted among her excellencies. George would have been fond of almost any woman who was pretty enough to be loved and not clever enough to be feared; but his cousin Maria was beyond even his powers of falling in love, although, to do him justice

ed on the Osierfield with the help of Richard Smallwood, who had been the general manager of the collieries and ironworks belonging to the firm in their father's time, and knew as much about iron (and most other things) as he did. Maria was a good woman of business, and she and Richard between them made mo

Close upon a dozen years ago the two sisters had adopted the orphaned child of a second cousin, whose young widow had died in giving birth to a posthumous daughter;

h an overpowering sense of their own inferiority and unworthiness. During the first decade of her existence Elisabeth used frequently and earnestly to pray that her hair might become golden and her eyes brown; but as on this score the heavens remained as br

Elisabeth exclaimed, à propos of nothing but her own m

frivolous a desire in her august hearing; but Elisabeth was never afraid of anybody,

tful and beauty is vain; and the Lord looketh o

eth: "I was thinking of other people; and they love

le ready to love you; and especially if you carry yourself well and never stoop." Like many another elect lady, Cousin Maria regarded beauty of face as a vanity, but

so, life would be too hard for the generation that has passed the hill-top. Elisabeth's was one of those happy, pantheistic natures that possess the gift of finding God everywhere and in everything. She early caught the Methodist habit of self-analysis and introspect

ology, as set forth in Mangnall's Questions, and had devoted herself to the service of Pallas Athene, having learned that that goddess was (like herself) not surpassingly beautiful, and was, moreover, handicapped by the possession of gray eyes. Miss Farringdon would have be

e long advertisement of other people's virtues. "She used to be somewhat careless in letting the fires go out, and so giving the servants the

h has outgrown her habit of wool-gathering, and of letting the fire go out under her very nose without noticing it. It is a

le each besetment of the Crosbie household-which was as carefully preserved for its particular owner as if sin were a species of ground game-never failed to thrill her with enjoyable disgust. She knew a great portion of the Methodist hymn-book by heart, and pondered long over the interesting preface to that work, wondering much what "doggerel" and "botches" could be-she inclined to the supposition that the former were animals and the latter were diseases; but even her vivid imagination failed to form a satisfactory representation of such queer kittle-cattle as "feeble expletives." Every Sunday she gloated over the frontispiece of John Wesley, in his gown and bands and white ringlets, feeling that, though poor as a picture, it was very superior to the letterpress; the wors

ng at the public instead-a more effective if less realistic attitude than the ordinary one of sitting the right way about; because-as Elisabeth reasoned, and reasoned rightly-if these gentlemen had not happened to be behind before when their portraits were taken, nobody would ever have known whose portraits they

o small and the picture hung so high that she could not see it very distinctly; but it appeared to her that the boy Wesley (whom she confused in her own mind with

Farringdon, which depicted a gigantic urn, surrounded by a forest of cypress, through the shades whereof flitted "young-eyed cherubims" with dirty wings and bilious complexions, these last mentioned blemishes being, it is but fair to add, the fault of the a

am, as a delicate compliment to the departed. Elisabeth delighted in this window, it was so realistic. The patriarch lay asleep, with his head on a little white tombstone at the foot of a sol

onplace. We, with our added culture and our maturer artistic perceptions, may smile at a Jacob's Ladder formed according to the domestic architecture of the first half of the nineteenth century; but the people to whom the other world was so near and so real that they perceived nothing incongruous in an ordinary stair-carpet which

the Hymn-book; these hymns the Sunday School children sang by themselves, while the congregation sat swaying to and fro to the tune. And Elisabeth's soul was uplifted within her as she listened to the children's voices; for she felt that mystical hush which-let us hope-comes to us all at some time or other, when we hide our faces in our mantles and feel that a Presence is passing by, and is passing by so near to us that we have only to stretch out our hands in order to touch it. At sundry times and in divers manners does that wonderful sense of a Personal Touch come to men and to women. It may b