ockwork." My mother occasionally
apologised for the evening being so exclusively musical (we were great
singers). Whenever she did so, the reply was prompt from U.T.: "I'm
passionately fond of music." This, to us children, was highly ludicrous.
Indeed, my mother was amused--she had no Manx blood in her--but my
father accepted U.T.'s assurance with the utmost confidence. His
chivalrous nature, more deeply tinged than hers with Celtic tenderness,
or the very finest kind of Celtic make-believe (_Anglice_--humbug; oh
those English!), had no difficulty in accepting U.T.'s "passionately."
_Passion_ in U.T.! Well, to us it was a splendid joke. I sometimes
wonder whether the vicar, too, at times, had lucid intervals of the
bare, naked reality. He had a fine sense of humour, and he would have
considered it a baseness to laugh at the poor thing, with its pretence
of passion, trying to screen its forlornness. What U.T. felt was not the
passion for music, but just the soothing, comforting sense of being at
home with us, of being accepted as one of ourselves, of not being
"scoulded," of indisputable respectability, of being thought capable of
"passion," even so ethereal a passion as that of music. How blessed
those hours must have been to U.T.! He sometimes missed them. But it
never was my father's fault. Was it U.T.'s? Well, we children had no
idea that he drank. But now, of course, I know that when U.T. did not
appear on a Sunday, he must have been "hard at it" on Saturday; and into
the kingdom of heaven he must have taken the Sundays, not the Saturdays.

Forgive all this. But I have been so much touched with your taking up my
reference to the dear old Vicar of Braddan that I could not help
extending the portrait a little.

And for the backsliders, the "weak brethren, the outcasts--aw! let's
feel for the lek, and 'keep a houl' o' their ban.'"

Do write again. You will do me so much good.

VISIONS
[Sidenote: _Calverley_]

In lone Glenartney's thickets lies crouched the lordly stag,
The dreaming terrier's tail forgets its customary wag;
And plodding ploughman's weary steps insensibly grow quicker,
As broadening casements light them on toward home, or home-brewed liquor.

It is, in brief, the evening--that pure and pleasant time
When stars break into splendour, and poets into rhyme;
When in the glass of Memory the forms of loved ones shine--
And when, of course, Miss Goodchild's is prominent in mine.

Mis