arly all his contemporaries. The wildest dreamer of those days
never anticipated that, in the passage of one brief generation, social
advancement should be for the shrewdly ignorant rather than for the
scholar: that it would be better for a man that his mind be stored
with knowledge of the world than the wisdom of the classics: that the
successful grocer might find a kinder welcome in a palace than the
scholar: that the manufacturer of kitchen utensils might feed with kings
and speak to them, without aspirates, between the courses.

Parson Marvin knew none of these things, however; nor suspected that the
advance of civilisation is not always progressive, but that she may take
hands with vulgarity and dance down-hill, as she does to-day. His one
scheme of life for Sep was that he should be sent to the ancient school
where field-sports are cultivated to-day and English gentlemen turned
upon the world more ignorant than any other gentlemen in the universe.
Then, of course, Sep must go to that College with which his father's
life had been so closely allied. And if it please God to call him to the
Church, and the College should remember that it had given his father a
living, and do the same by him--for that reason and no other--then, of
course, Sep would be a made man.

And the making of Sep had been in progress during the winter day that
a fog-bank came in from the North Sea and clung tenaciously to the low,
surfless coast. In the afternoon the sun broke through at last,
wintry and pale. Sep, who, by some instinct--the instinct, it is to
be supposed, of young animals--knew that he was destined to be of a
generation that should cultivate ignorance out of doors, rather than
learning by the fireside, threw aside his books and cried out that he
could no longer breathe in his father's study.

So Paid Marvin went off, alone, to visit a distant parishioner--one who
was dying by himself out on the marsh, in a cottage cut off from all the
world in a spring tide.

"Don't forget that it is high tide at five o'clock, and that there is
no moon, and that the dykes will be full. You will never find your way
across the marsh after dark," said Sep--the learned in tides and those
practical affairs of nature, which were as a closed book to the scholar.

Parson Marvin vaguely acknowledged the warning and went away, leaving
Sep to accompany Miriam on her daily errand to the simple shops in
Farlingford, which would awake to life and business