hing the sleeve of the
farmer's wife as she flounced out after service.

"Splendid!" said she, "and must have hit some folk pretty hard too."

"It kept your husband awake this time, I should think," said the
Kyrkegrim.

"Heighty teighty!" cried the farmer's wife. "I'd have you to know my
good man is as decent a body as any in the parish, if he does take a
nap on Sundays! He is no sinner if he is no saint, thank Heaven, and
the parson knows better than to preach at him."

"Next Sunday," said the Kyrkegrim to the priest, "preach about
something which concerns everyone; respectable people as well as
others."

So the preacher preached of Death--whom tears cannot move, nor riches
bribe, nor power defy. The uncertain interruption and the only certain
end of all life's labors! And as he preached, the women sitting in
their seats wept for the dead whose graves they had been tending, and
down the aged cheeks of the Kyrkegrim there stole tears of pity for
poor men, whose love and labors are cut short so soon.

But the farmer slept as before.

"Do you expect to die?" asked the Kyrkegrim.

"Surely," replied the farmer, "we must all die some day, and one does
not need a preacher to tell him that. But it was a funeral sermon, my
wife thinks. There has been bereavement in the miller's family."

"Men are a strange race," thought the Kyrkegrim; but he went to the
priest and said--"The farmer is not afraid of death. You must find
some subject of which men really stand in awe."

So when Sunday came round again, the preacher preached of
Judgment--that dread Avenger who dogs the footsteps of trespass, even
now! That awful harvest of whirlwind and corruption which they must
reap who sow to the wind and to the flesh! Lightly regarded, but
biding its time, till a man's forgotten follies find him out at last.

But the farmer slept on. He did not wake when the preacher spoke of
judgment to come, the reckoning that cannot be shunned, the trump of
the Archangel, and the Day of Doom.

"On Michaelmas Day I shall preach myself," said the Kyrkegrim, "and if
I cannot rouse him, I shall give up my charge here."

This troubled the poor priest, for so good a Kyrkegrim was not likely
to be found again.

Nevertheless he consented, for he was very meek, and when Michaelmas
Day came the Kyrkegrim pulled a preacher's gown over his home-spun
coat, and laid his round hat on the desk by the iron-clamped Bible,
and began his sermon.

"I shall g