gathered sprays, the plants interspersed among more showy flowers, would be found to form a very pleasing feature in a bouquet.
Asterisk.
TOM MORLAND’S PREFERMENT.
CHAPTER I.
“Chanleigh! Chanleigh!” shouted the guard, with a conventional accentuation on the word which almost prevented its recognition, and Tom Morland, who had been on the look-out for the station for the last quarter of an hour, got out of the train. But Chanleigh was not his destination. He inquired of the station master how far off the village of Beauchamp was; and learning that the distance might be “something better nor three miles,” he desired that his luggage might be sent on in the solitary square box on wheels which, doing duty as a fly, had come down from the inn on speculation; and set out on foot in the direction indicated.
“I take yon to be the new parson of Beauchamp,” said one of the bystanders to another.
The supposition was a correct one. Tom Morland, at thirty-seven years of age, had become rector of Beauchamp. He had been a hard-working curate for thirteen years: during a portion of them he had had the care of a large straggling parish, in the opposite extremities of which he held three services every Sunday. His preferment came to him in this wise. One Sunday afternoon he had arrived, according to his custom, at a little chapel on a breezy common, which was situated some miles from the Vicarage house in which he was permitted to live during the lengthened absence of its rightful owner in Italy. He was in the act of putting on his surplice, when a sudden idea caused him to feel in his pocket for his sermon,—in vain. He remembered that the weather having suddenly changed just before his leaving home, he had taken off his coat and put on an older and thicker one: in the pocket of his best garment the sermon had undoubtedly remained. Tom Morland had never yet attempted an extempore sermon: he held that the mere fact of writing down ideas compelled a closer and deeper study of the subject; that what was unsound in the matter would sometimes strike the outward eye more readily than the inward one. Nevertheless, on this occasion, there was no help for it. While the congregation were singing four verses of a hymn, he made up his mind what text he would take for his discourse. Tom was not a nervous man; the sight of the thirty or forty upturned faces from the open benches gave him no pang of alarm, and his sermon, which was brief, and very much to the point, did not suffer from the circumstances under which he preached it. He was leaving the church at the conclusion of the service, when the old beadle, whose checks were like a winter apple, hurried up to him with the intelligence that Squire Luttrell had brought a visitor to church with him that afternoon, and that he had it on the authority of the squire’s servants that the visitor was no other than the Bishop of . Tom remembered that once or twice during the service he had met the eyes of a little old gentleman in the squire’s pew, and he laughed as he caught himself wishing that he had not left his sermon in his best coat pocket. Three weeks afterwards, when Tom had almost forgotten the occurrence, the squire’s distinguished visitor presented him to the living of Beauchamp, of the annual value of three hundred and twenty-seven pounds.
Tom came down to his new home a solitary man. His father and mother had died when he was young: the money they left behind them had barely served to complete his preparation for the church. He had had a sister some years older than himself, far away in India, and married to a chaplain there. She was a fair, gentle, kind-hearted creature. She had been Tom’s ideal of womanly perfection in his childhood, and so she remained throughout his life. He never saw her after their separation in his youth. She was amongst the victims of a violent outbreak of cholera at a distant station, and her death was the sole darkening shadow on Tom’s life, which was otherwise essentially a happy one. He had strong health and buoyant spirits; perhaps he had but an ordinary intellect, but he was thoroughly practical in his dealings with the souls as well as the bodies of his fellow-men, and he had an honest-hearted sincerity about him that won him friends amongst all classes. In person he was tall and stout, with a cheerful smile and kindly brown eyes. His was something better than a merely handsome face: it was a bright and genial one.
The fly containing Tom’s luggage rumbled by, and was some time before it was out of sight. He strode on with a pleasant sense of freedom in his limbs. The country grew picturesque as he left the town of Chanleigh behind him. It was certainly flat, but then it was well wooded, and watered by a little river that ran swiftly and clearly over its pebbly bed. On the banks grew tall grasses, luxuriant in the shade of the willows. He came at length upon a common, covered with long brambles, stretching over stunted gorse bushes, behind which were hid away pools of water known only to the cottagers’ asses and their foals, and one or two worn-out plough-horses turned out to graze there. Leaving the common to his right, he made his way down a shady lane, arched with long branches of elm and oak, and presently came upon a village which he rightly concluded to be Beauchamp. At intervals he had passed several farm-houses, which wore an air of comfort and plenty. The village, however, was not in character with them. Damp had seized on many of the cottages. Here, the roof, the walls, and the out-house were covered with a moss of vivid green, which clung tenaciously, and turned all to rottenness beneath it; there, the door was coated with a fungus which grew as surely as the night came, to be destroyed in the morning, and to grow again, till man’s patience was exhausted in the conflict. Hinges had given way; locks were loose, for the screws would never stay in; a dozen carpenters might work from morning till night without effecting much good with such unsatisfactory materials. At every third or fourth house beer was licensed “to be