world! The God that he tells them of is a
fiction of his imagination; indeed, I might say a mere creature of his
fancy, who is going to save all men in the end, whatever they do!"

"A Universalist!"

"Oh, worse than that--at least, I have read the books of Universalists
who, though their error was great, did not appear to me so far astray. I
cannot understand it! I cannot understand it!" he went on; "I cannot
understand the influence that he has obtained over our more educated
class; for twenty years ago he was himself a low, besotted drunkard, and
his wife is the daughter of a murderer! Still less do I understand how
such people can claim to be religious at all, and yet not see to what
awful evil the small beginnings of vice must lead. I tell you, if a man
is allowed by Providence to lead an easy life, and remains unfaithful,
he may still have some good metal in him which adversity might refine;
but when people have gone through all that Toyner and his wife have been
through--not a child that has been born to them but has died at the
breast--I say, when they have been through all that, and still lead a
worldly, unsatisfactory life, you may be sure that there is nothing in
them that has the true ring of manhood or womanhood."

I was left alone to enter Mr. Toyner's gates. I found myself in a large
pleasure-ground, where Nature had been guided, not curtailed, in her
work. I was walking upon a winding drive, walled on either side by a
wild irregular line of shrubs, where the delicate forms of acacias and
crab-apples lifted themselves high in comparison to the lower lilac and
elderberry-bushes. I watched the sunlit acacias as they fluttered,
spreading their delicate leaves and golden pods against the blue above
me. I made my way leisurely in the direction of music which I heard at
some distance. I had not advanced far before another person came into my
path.

He was a slight, delicate man of middle size. His hair and moustache
were almost quite white. Something in the air of neatness and perfection
about his dress, in the extreme gravity and clearness of his grey eyes,
even in the fine texture of that long, thin, drooping moustache, made it
evident to me that this new companion was not what we call an ordinary
person.

"Your friend did not come in with you." The voice spoke disappointment;
the speaker looked wistfully at the form of the retreating clergyman
which he could just see through a gap in the shrubs.

"You