lly was with
him, he was never visited by the thought that perhaps his sympathy with
her was not quick and watchful enough; but now he re-lived all their life
together, with that terrible keenness of memory and imagination which
bereavement gives, and he felt as if his very love needed a pardon for
its poverty and selfishness.

No outward solace could counteract the bitterness of this inward woe. But
outward solace came. Cold faces looked kind again, and parishioners
turned over in their minds what they could best do to help their pastor.
Mr. Oldinport wrote to express his sympathy, and enclosed another
twenty-pound note, begging that he might be permitted to contribute in
this way to the relief of Mr. Barton's mind from pecuniary anxieties,
under the pressure of a grief which all his parishioners must share; and
offering his interest towards placing the two eldest girls in a school
expressly founded for clergymen's daughters. Mr. Cleves succeeded in
collecting thirty pounds among his richer clerical brethren, and, adding
ten pounds himself, sent the sum to Amos, with the kindest and most
delicate words of Christian fellowship and manly friendship. Miss Jackson
forgot old grievances, and came to stay some months with Milly's
children, bringing such material aid as she could spare from her small
income. These were substantial helps, which relieved Amos from the
pressure of his money difficulties; and the friendly attentions, the kind
pressure of the hand, the cordial looks he met with everywhere in his
parish, made him feel that the fatal frost which had settled on his
pastoral duties, during the Countess's residence at the Vicarage, was
completely thawed, and that the hearts of his parishioners were once more
open to him. No one breathed the Countess's name now; for Milly's memory
hallowed her husband, as of old the place was hallowed on which an angel
from God had alighted.

When the spring came, Mrs. Hackit begged that she might have Dickey to
stay with her, and great was the enlargement of Dickey's experience from
that visit. Every morning he was allowed--being well wrapt up as to his
chest by Mrs. Hackit's own hands, but very bare and red as to his
legs--to run loose in the cow and poultry yard, to persecute the
turkey-cock by satirical imitations of his gobble-gobble, and to put
difficult questions to the groom as to the reasons why horses had four
legs, and other transcendental matters. Then Mr. Hackit would take