as promotion cometh from any
human source, whether north or south, east or west, will not such a
claim as this hold good, in spite of all our examination tests, _detur
digniori's_, and optimist tendencies? It is fervently to be hoped that
it may. Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human,
lest in our hurry for a change we sink to something lower.

And then the pair, sitting down lovingly together, talked over all
their difficulties, as they so often did, and all their hopes, as they
so seldom were enabled to do.

"You had better call on that man, Q., as you come away from the
palace," said Mrs. Quiverful, pointing to an angry call for money
from the Barchester draper, which the postman had left at the
vicarage that morning. Cormorant that he was, unjust, hungry
cormorant! When rumour first got abroad that the Quiverfuls were to
go to the hospital, this fellow with fawning eagerness had pressed
his goods upon the wants of the poor clergyman. He had done so,
feeling that he should be paid from the hospital funds, and
flattering himself that a man with fourteen children, and money
wherewithal to clothe them, could not but be an excellent customer.
As soon as the second rumour reached him, he applied for his money
angrily.

And "the fourteen"--or such of them as were old enough to hope and
discuss their hopes--talked over their golden future. The tall grown
girls whispered to each other of possible Barchester parties, of
possible allowances for dress, of a possible piano--the one they had
in the vicarage was so weather-beaten with the storms of years and
children as to be no longer worthy of the name--of the pretty garden,
and the pretty house. 'Twas of such things it most behoved them to
whisper.

And the younger fry, they did not content themselves with whispers,
but shouted to each other of their new playground beneath our dear
ex-warden's well-loved elms, of their future own gardens, of marbles
to be procured in the wished-for city, and of the rumour which had
reached them of a Barchester school.

'Twas in vain that their cautious mother tried to instil into their
breasts the very feeling she had striven to banish from that of their
father; 'twas in vain that she repeated to the girls that "there's
many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip;" 'twas in vain she attempted
to make the children believe that they were to live at Puddingdale
all their lives. Hopes mounted high, and would not have themselves