I cannot understand it! I cannot understand it!" he went on; "I cannot understand the influence that he has obtained over our more educated class; for twenty years ago he was himself a low, besotted drunkard, and his wife is the daughter of a murderer! Still less do I understand how such people can claim to be religious at all, and yet not see to what awful evil the small beginnings of vice must lead.

I tell you, if a man is allowed by Providence to lead an easy life, and remains unfaithful, he may still have some good metal in him which adversity might refine; but when people have gone through all that Toyner and his wife have been through--not a child that has been born to them but has died at the breast--I say, when they have been through all that, and still lead a worldly, unsatisfactory life, you may be sure that there is nothing in them that has the true ring of manhood or womanhood." I was left alone to enter Mr.Toyner's gates.

I found myself in a large pleasure-ground, where Nature had been guided, not curtailed, in her work.

I was walking upon a winding drive, walled on either side by a wild irregular line of shrubs, where the delicate forms of acacias and crab-apples lifted themselves high in comparison to the lower lilac and elderberry-bushes.

I watched the sunlit acacias as they fluttered, spreading their delicate leaves and golden pods against the blue above me.