as he, I can. It is laid on my soul to do this.' I had no more to say."

"That is one point of view, but we mustn't lose sight of the practical,
either. To be his wife and bear his children--I call it a waste, a--"

"Yes, yes. So it is." And what more could the bishop say? After a
little, he added, "But still we must not forget that he, too, is a human
soul and has a value as great as hers."

"According to your viewpoint, but not to mine--not to mine. If a man is
enslaved to his own appetites, he has no right to enslave another to
them."

The following day David took himself back to his hermitage, setting
aside all persuasions to remain.

"Don't make a recluse of yourself," begged the bishop's wife. "The
amenities of life can't always be dispensed with, and we need you, James
and I, you and your music."

David laughed. "I'm too fatally human to become a recluse, and as for
the amenities, they are not all of one order, you know. I find plenty of
scope for exercising them on others, and I often submit to having them
exercised on me,--after their own ideas." He laughed again. "I wish you
could look into my larder. You'd find me provided with all the hills
afford. They have loaded me with gifts."

"No wonder! I know what your life up there means to them, taking care of
their mothers and babies, and sitting up with them nights, going to them
when they are in trouble, rain or shine, and visiting them in their
bare, wretched, crowded homes."

"It wouldn't be so bad often, if it weren't that when a family is in
serious trouble or has a case needing quiet and care, the sympathies of
all their relatives are roused, and they come crowding in. In one case,
the father was ill with pneumonia. I did all I could for him, and next
day--would you believe it?--I found his sister and her 'old man' and
their three youngsters, his old mother and a brother and a widowed
sister, all camped down on them, all in one room. The sister sat by the
fire nursing her three-months-old baby, his mother was smoking at her
side, and the sick man's six little children and their three cousins
were raising Ned, in and out, with three or four hounds. Not one of the
visitors was helping, or, as they say up there, 'doing a lick,' but the
wife was cooking for the whole raft when her husband needed all her
care. Marvellous ideas they have, some of them."

"You ought to write out some of your experiences."

"Oh, I can't. It would seem like a sort of betr