been cleaner. There's another of
your grumbling fine ladies! Now for sure she'd nothing to grumble at,
sitting so grand at table with a glass of sherry-wine to drink."

"The husband looks a cantankerous chap," remarked Caleb.

"Poor thing! it's his liver," said Mrs. Bateson, taking up the cudgels
as usual on behalf of the bilious and oppressed. "You can see from his
complexion that he is out of order, and that all that rich dinner will
do him no good. It was his wife's duty to see that he had something
plain to eat, with none of them sauces and fal-lals, instead of playing
the fine lady and making troubles out of nothing. I've no patience with
her!"

"Still, he do look as if he'd a temper," persisted Mr. Bateson.

"And if he do, Caleb, what of that? If a man in his own house hasn't the
right to show a bit of temper, I should like to know who has? I've no
patience with the women that will get married and have a man of their
own; and then cry their eyes out because the man isn't an old woman. If
they want meekness and obedience, let 'em remain single and keep lapdogs
and canaries; and leave the husbands for those as can manage 'em and
enjoy 'em, for there ain't enough to go round as it is." And Mrs.
Bateson waxed quite indignant.

Here Tremaine took up his parable. "This weird figure, clothed in skins,
and feeding upon nothing more satisfying than locusts and wild honey, is
a type of all those who are set apart for the difficult and
unsatisfactory lot of heralds and forerunners. They see the good time
coming, and make ready the way for it, knowing all the while that its
fuller light and wider freedom are not for them; they lead their fellows
to the very borders of the promised land, conscious that their own
graves are already dug in the wilderness. No great social or political
movement has ever been carried on without their aid; and they have never
reaped the benefits of those reforms which they lived and died to
compass. Perhaps there are no sadder sights on the page of history than
those solitary figures, of all nations and all times, who have foretold
the coming of the dawn and yet died before it was yet day."'

"Did you ever?" exclaimed Mrs. Bateson _sotto voce_; "a grown man like
that, and not to know John the Baptist when he sees him! Forerunners and
heralds indeed! Why, it's John the Baptist as large as life, and those
as don't recognise him ought to be ashamed of theirselves."

"Lucy Ellen would have known