not so
destroyed have to be borne by the sinner himself."

"Well, I call that cowardice," said Haimet, drawing a red herring across
the track, "to want to burden somebody else with your sins. Why not
have the manliness to bear them yourself?"

"If you are so manly," answered Gerhardt with another of his quiet
smiles, "will you oblige me, Haimet, by taking up the Castle, and
setting it down on Presthey?"

"What are you talking about now? How could I?"

"Much more easily than you could atone for one sin. What do you call a
man who proposes to do the impossible?"

"A fool."

"And what would you call the bondman whose master had generously paid
his debt, and who refused to accept that generosity, but insisted on
working it out himself, though the debt was more than he could discharge
by the work of a thousand years?"

"Call him what you like," said Haimet, not wishing to go too deeply into
the question.

"I will leave you to choose the correct epithet," said Gerhardt, and
went on with his carving in silence.

The carving was beginning to bring in what Isel called "a pretty penny."
Gerhardt's skill soon became known, and the Countess of Oxford employed
him to make coffers, and once sent for him to the Castle to carve
wreaths on a set of oak panels. He took the work as it came, and in the
intervals, or on the summer evenings, he preached on the village greens
in the neighbourhood. His audiences were often small, but his doctrines
spread quietly and beneath the surface. Not one came forward to join
him openly, but many went away with thoughts that they had never had
before. Looked on from the outside, Gerhardt's work seemed of no value,
and blessed with no success. Yet it is possible that its inward
progress was not little. There may have been silent souls that lived
saintly lives in that long past century, who owed their first awakening
or their gradual edification to some word of his; it may be that the
sturdy resistance of England to Papal aggression in the subsequent
century had received its impetus from his unseen hand. Who shall say
that he achieved nothing? The world wrote "unsuccessful" upon his work:
did God write "blessed"? One thing at least I think he must have
written--"Thou hast been faithful in a few things." And while the
measure of faithfulness is not that of success, it is that of the
ultimate reward, in that Land where many that were first shall be last,
and the last first. "They t