miring love, which said little but treasured everything, and for
herself her inward happiness and peace shone through her quiet ways,
making her the mother and the friend of all about her.

As for Robert, he, of course, was living at high pressure all round.
Outside his sermons and his school, his Natural History Club had perhaps
most of his heart, and the passion for science, little continuous work
as he was able to give it, grew on him more and more. He kept up as best
he could, working with one hand, so to speak, when he could not spare
two, and in his long rambles over moor and hill, gathering in with his
quick eye a harvest of local fact wherewith to feed their knowledge and
his own.

The mornings he always spent at work among his books, the afternoons in
endless tramps over the parish, sometimes alone, sometimes with
Catherine; and in the evenings, if Catherine was 'at home,' twice a week
to womankind, he had his nights when his study became the haunt and prey
of half the boys in the place, who were free of everything, as soon as
he had taught them to respect his books, and not to taste his medicines;
other nights when he was lecturing or story-telling in the club or in
some outlying hamlet; or others again, when with Catherine beside him he
would sit trying to think some of that religious passion which burned in
both their hearts, into clear words or striking illustrations for his
sermons.

Then his choir was much upon his mind. He knew nothing about music, nor
did Catherine; their efforts made Rose laugh irreverently when she got
their letters at Berlin. But Robert believed in a choir chiefly as an
excellent social and centralising instrument. There had been none in Mr.
Preston's day. He was determined to have one, and a good one, and by
sheer energy he succeeded, delighting in his boyish way over the
opposition some of his novelties excited among the older and more
stiff-backed inhabitants.

'Let them talk,' he would say brightly to Catherine. 'They will come
round; and talk is good. Anything to make them think, to stir the
pool!'

Of course that old problem of the agricultural labourer weighed upon
him--his grievances, his wants. He went about pondering the English land
system, more than half inclined one day to sink part of his capital in a
peasant-proprietor experiment, and ingulfed the next in all the moral
and economical objection, to the French system. Land for allotments, at
any rate, he had set hi