of a man twenty years his junior.
As he daily took his morning walk for his mail, stepping with the brisk
pace of one whose poise the years had not been able to disturb, yet
with the stately bearing consistent with the dignity attaching to
his position and office, men's eyes followed the tall, handsome,
white-haired, well set up gentleman always with admiration and, where
knowledge was intimate, with reverence and affection. Before the recent
rapid growth of the town consequent upon the establishment of various
manufacturing industries attracted thither by the unique railroad
facilities, the Rector's walk was something in the nature of public
perambulatory reception. For he knew them all, and for all had a word
of greeting, of enquiry, of cheer, of admonition, so that by the time
he had returned to his home he might have been said to have conducted a
pastoral visitation of a considerable proportion of his flock. Even yet,
with the changes that had taken place, his walk to the Post Office was
punctuated with greetings and salutations from his fellow-citizens in
whose hearts his twenty-five years of devotion to their well-being,
spiritual and physical, had made for him an enduring place.

The lady of the Rectory, though some twenty years his junior, yet, by
reason of delicate health due largely to the double burden of household
cares and parish duties, appeared to be quite of equal age. Gentle in
spirit, frail in body, there seemed to be in her soul something of the
quality of tempered steel, yet withal a strain of worldly wisdom
mingled with a strange ignorance of the affairs of modern life. Her life
revolved around one centre, her adored husband, a centre enlarged as
time went on to include her only son and her two daughters. All others
and all else in her world were of interest solely as they might be more
or less closely related to these, the members of her family. The town
and the town folk she knew solely as her husband's parish. There were
other people and other communions, no doubt, but being beyond the pale
they could hardly be supposed to matter, or, at any rate, she could not
be supposed to regard them with more than the interest and spasmodic
concern which she felt it her duty to bestow upon those unfortunate
dwellers in partibus infidelium.

Regarding the Public School of the town with aversion because of its
woefully democratic character, she was weaned from her hostility to that
institution when her son's