turally rather dislike a movement of the kind. But there was no active
or even passive opposition. The cottage folk just ignored the Church;
nothing more and nothing less. No efforts were spared to obtain their
good-will and to draw them into the fold, but there was absolutely no
response. Not a labourer's family in that wide district was left
unvisited. The cottages were scattered far apart, dotted here and there,
one or two down in a narrow coombe surrounded on three sides by the green
wall of the hills. Others stood on the bleak plains, unsheltered by tree
or hedge, exposed to the keen winds that swept across the level, yet
elevated fields. A new cottage built in modern style, with glaring red
brick, was perched on the side of a hill, where it was visible miles away.
An old thatched one stood in a hollow quite alone, half a mile from the
highway, and so hidden by the oaks that an army might have ravaged the
country and never found it. How many, many miles of weary walking such
rounds as these required!

Though they had, perhaps, never received a 'visitor' before, it was
wonderful with what skill the cottage women especially--the men being
often away at work--adapted themselves to the new _regime_. Each time they
told a more pitiful tale, set in such a realistic framing of hardship and
exposure that a stranger could not choose but believe. In the art of
encouraging attentions of this sort no one excels the cottage women; the
stories they will relate, with the smallest details inserted in the right
place, are something marvellous. At first you would exclaim with the
deepest commiseration, such a case of suffering and privation as this
cannot possibly be equalled by any in the parish; but calling at the next
cottage, you are presented with a yet more moving relation, till you find
the whole population are plunged in misery and afflicted with incredible
troubles. They cannot, surely, be the same folk that work so sturdily at
harvest. But when the curate has administered words of consolation and
dropped the small silver dole in the palm, when his shovel-hat and black
frock-coat tails have disappeared round the corner of the copse, then in a
single second he drops utterly out of mind. No one comes to church the
more. If inquiries are made why they did not come, a hundred excuses are
ready; the rain, a bad foot, illness of the infant, a cow taken ill and
requiring attention, and so on.

After some months of such experience