The shepherds' meetings--first at Clough End for the Cheshire side of the Scout, and then at the 'Snake Inn' for the Sheffield side--when the strayed sheep of the year were restored to their owners, came and went in due course; sheep-washing and sheep-shearing were over; the summer was halfway through; and still no word from Mr.Ancrum.
David, full of annoyance and disappointment, was seething with fresh plans--he and Louie spent hours discussing them at the smithy--when suddenly an experience overtook him, which for the moment effaced all his nascent ambitions, and entirely did away with Louie's new respect for him.
It was on this wise.
Mr.Ancrum had left Clough End towards the end of June.

The congregation to which he ministered, and to which Reuben Grieve belonged, represented one of those curious and independent developments of the religious spirit which are to be found scattered through the teeming towns and districts of northern England.

They had no connection with any recognised religious community, but the members of it had belonged to many--to the Church, the Baptists, the Independents, the Methodists.

They were mostly mill-hands or small tradesmen, penetrated on the one side with the fervour, the yearnings, the strong formless poetry of English evangelical faith, and repelled on the other by various features in the different sects from which they came--by the hierarchical strictness of the Wesleyan organisation, or the looseness of the Congregationalists, or the coldness of the Church.
They had come together to seek the Lord in some way more intimate, more moving, more effectual than any they had yet found; and in this pathetic search for the 'rainbow gold' of faith they were perpetually brought up against the old stumbling-blocks of the unregenerate man,--the smallest egotisms, and the meanest vanities.
Mr.Ancrum, for instance, had come to the Clough End 'Brethren' full of an indescribable missionary zeal.

He had laboured for them night and day, taxing his sickly frame far beyond its powers.