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Note 1. "Four lane ends," a place where four roads meet.

Note 2. "Hoggart", a ghost.

CHAPTER THREE.

THE RECTORY.

The Reverend Bernard Oliphant, rector of Waterland, was a man of good
family and moderate fortune. At the time when this tale opens he had
held the living eighteen years. He had three sons and one daughter.
The eldest son, Hubert, was just three-and-twenty, and, having finished
his course at Oxford with credit, was spending a year or two at home
previously to joining an uncle in South Australia, Abraham Oliphant, his
father's brother, who was living in great prosperity as a merchant at
Adelaide. Hubert had not felt himself called on to enter the ministry,
though his parents would have greatly rejoiced had he seen his way clear
to engage in that sacred calling. But the young man abhorred the
thought of undertaking such an office unless he could feel decidedly
that the highest and holiest motives were guiding him to it, and neither
father nor mother dared urge their son to take on himself, from any
desire to please them, so awful a responsibility. Yet none the less for
this did Hubert love his Saviour, nor did he wish to decline his
service, or shrink from bearing that cross which is laid on all who make
a bold and manly profession of faith in Christ Jesus. But he felt that
there were some who might serve their heavenly Master better as laymen
than as ministers of the gospel, and he believed himself to be such a
one. His two younger brothers, not feeling the same difficulties, were
both preparing for the ministry. Hubert had a passionate desire to
travel; his parents saw this, and wisely judged that it would be better
to guide his passion than to combat it; so, when his uncle proposed to
Hubert to join him in Australia, they gave their full consent. They
knew that a strong expression of dissuasion on their part would have led
him to abandon the scheme at once; but they would not let any such
expression escape them, because they felt that they were bound to
consult _his_ tastes and wishes, and not merely their own. They knew
that his faith was on the Rock of Ages; they could trust his life and
fortunes to their God. For Bernard Oliphant and his wife had but one
great object set before them, and that was to work for God. The rector
was warm and impulsive, the fire would flash out upon the surface, yet
was it under the control of grace; it blazed, it warmed, b