in the middle of the village. On the dark December evenings
there would be perhaps not more than half a dozen worshippers, each one
of whom would have brought his own candle and stuck it on the shelf of
the pew. The organist would have two candles for the harmonium; the
choir of three little boys and one little girl would have two between
them; the altar would have two; the Vicar would have two. But when all
the candle-light was put together, it left most of the church in shadow;
indeed, it scarcely even illuminated the space between the worshippers,
so that each one seemed wrapped in a golden aura of prayer, most of all
when at Evensong the people knelt in silence for a minute while the
sound of the sea without rose and fell and the noise of the wind
scuttling through the ivy on the walls was audible. When the
congregation had gone out and the Vicar was standing at the churchyard
gate saying "good night," Mark used to think that they must all be
feeling happy to go home together up the long hill to Pendhu and down
into twinkling Nancepean. And it did not matter whether it was a night
of clear or clouded moonshine or a night of windy stars or a night of
darkness; for when it was dark he could always look back from the valley
road and see a company of lanthorns moving homeward; and that more than
anything shed upon his young spirit the grace of human fellowship and
the love of mankind.

CHAPTER VIII

THE WRECK

One wild night in late October of the year before he would be thirteen,
Mark was lying awake hoping, as on such nights he always hoped, to hear
somebody shout "A wreck! A wreck!" A different Mark from that one who
used to lie trembling in Lima Street lest he should hear a shout of
"Fire! or Thieves!"

And then it happened! It happened as a hundred times he had imagined its
happening, so exactly that he could hardly believe for a moment he was
not dreaming. There was the flash of a lanthorn on the ceiling, a
thunderous, knocking on the Vicarage door. Mark leapt out of bed;
flinging open his window through which the wind rushed in like a flight
of angry birds, he heard voices below in the garden shouting "Parson!
Parson! Parson Trehawke! There's a brig driving in fast toward Church
Cove." He did not wait to hear more, but dashed along the passage to
rouse first his grandfather, then his mother, and then Emma, the Vicar's
old cook.

"And you must get soup ready," he cried, standing over the old woman in