a to the warmth and light of a southern
aspect. It is bare of all architectural ornament. Its windows are
few and small. The rooms within are gloomy, even in early summer. Its
architect seems to have feared this gloominess, for he planned great bay
windows for three rooms, one above the other. He built the bay. It juts
out for the whole height of the house, breaking the flatness of the
northern wall. But his heart failed him in the end. He dared not put
such a window in the house. He walled up the whole flat front of the
bay. Only in its sides did he place windows. Through these there is a
side view of the sea and a side view of the main wall of the house. They
are comparatively safe. The full force of the tempest does not strike
them fair.

In one of the gloomy rooms on a bright morning in the middle of May
sat the Reverend Micah Ward, the minister. The sun shone outside on the
yellow sand, the green water, and the white rocks; but neither sun nor
sea had tempted Micah Ward from his books. Great leather-covered folios
lay at his elbow on the table. Before him were an open Hebrew Bible, a
Septuagint with queer, contracted lettering, and an old yellow-leaved
Vulgate. The subject of his studies was the Book of Amos, who was the
ruggedest, the fiercest, and the most democratic of the Hebrew prophets.
Micah Ward's face was clean-shaved and marked with heavy lines. Thick,
bushy brows hung over eyes which were keen and bright in spite of all
his studying. Looking at his face, a man might judge him to be hard,
narrow, strong--perhaps fanatical. Near the window:--one of the slanting
windows through which it is tantalising to look--sat a young man, tall
beyond the common, well knit, strong--Neal Ward, the minister's son. He
had grown hardy in the keen sea air and firm of will under his father's
rigid discipline. He had never known a mother's care, for Margaret Ward,
a bright-faced woman, ill-mated, so they said, with the minister, never
recovered strength after her son's birth. She lingered for a year, and
then died. They laid her body in Templeastra Graveyard, near the
sea. Over her grave her husband set a stone with an austerely-worded
inscription to keep her name in memory:--"The burying-ground of Micah
Ward. Margaret Neal, his wife, 1778." Such inscriptions are to be found
in scores in the graveyards of Antrim. The hard, brave men who chose
to mark thus the resting-places of their dead disdained parade of their
affliction an