is!"

Joyce had seldom, if ever, spoken familiarly to any of the girls about
the country side before. Mrs. Falconer had her views on the subject, and
the "miner folks" were her especial aversion, while Mrs. More's attempts
to civilise them were met with derision and scorn. The gulf set between
her and her household of respectable maids, and the rough, half-clothed
miner's families, was in her eyes impassable! What was the use of
trying to reclaim those who preferred their own rough and evil ways?
They ought to be well punished for raids made on farm yards, and snares
set in copses and plantations; but to teach them to read, and talk to
them about their duty to God and their neighbour, was in Mrs. Falconer's
eyes worse than lost labour; it did harm rather than good.

And not only by Mrs. Falconer was this view of the unclothed and
unwashed masses taken! In our days of widely spread and organised
charities, and zeal, sometimes I fear hardly tempered with wisdom, it is
difficult to throw ourselves back to the beginning of the century now
drawing to its close, when efforts like those of the four sisters of the
Mendips, of whom Hannah was the leading spirit, were met with scoffs and
disapproval; or deep compassion, that educated women could be so
misguided, as to wish to teach the boys and girls of their district,
anything but to use their legs and arms in the service of their betters!

As I stood by the heavy stone in Wrington churchyard, in the gloom of
an autumn afternoon, where the names of the four sisters are inscribed,
I could but think of the gratitude we ought to feel to them for their
brave efforts to spread the knowledge of the religion of Christ amongst
the poor of those 'rolling hills' and peaceful valleys of
Somersetshire. It must have been hard for a woman of culture like Hannah
More to be met by opposition, and in some cases fierce denunciation;
harder still to be smiled at by those in high places, as a fanatic and a
visionary. But turning from the ugly, weather-worn stone, enclosed in
high rusty railings, to the beautiful church, where what light there was
yet in the sky, came through the many-coloured window lately erected to
Hannah More's memory, I thought, that as nothing that is good and
beautiful, coming from the Fountain of all beauty and all goodness, can
ever die, so the light which Hannah More kindled in many humble hearts
was still shining in the eternal kingdom, where those that have lived as
i