he usually rode over for his health's sake, upon which he knew his anxieties were telling. Besides, fast trotting, with a good gallop, blew the dust from his brains, he thought, and generally enabled him to arrange a sermon.

38

CHAPTER IV.

"And her face is lily-clear,

Lily-shaped, and dropped in duty
To the law of its own beauty.
And a forehead fair and saintly,
Which two blue eyes undershine,

Like meek prayers before a shrine.”

Mrs. Browning.

MISS ANGELINA FANNY LANE CLAYTON seemed expressly designed by a beneficent Providence to be wife to some worthy clergyman; so, at least, thought very many of the best informed people at Hamerton, who, like well-informed people everywhere, were rather ready to attribute their own contriving wisdom to Providence,- with commendable piety, I suppose, if not with much philosophy. And it is likely that her mamma and papa had the same thought about their fair daughter, and not impossible that Miss Fanny

shared that opinion, at least since the same designing Providence had thought fit to bring into the town one of papa's two curates. Why should not Miss Clayton share the general opinion? She did, usually, on all subjects, even if the opinion did not happen to be as personally pleasant as it was in this case. The girl was very dutiful, very good, very pious. And she could not help knowing this, and thought that a minister's wife, to be perfect, ought to have all these excellences, only, of course, in a higher degree. And then her looking-glass told her that she was very fair, and had very soft beautiful flaxen hair, and dainty cheeks, faintly flushed with apple-bloom, and pretty dimples, and eyes blue as violets, that could not help looking, at times, very tender and melting. But she did not let the looking-glass talk to her thus very long, for in her innocent little soul she wanted to be very good, and knew she must not encourage any thoughts of vanity. For then how could she be one of God's dear children ?-and how could she deserve to be the wife of a very good minister? So once she even ventured to pray that she might grow ugly rather

than be vain; but she only prayed this once, because she half-thought that then she might not be so eligible for wife to a very good minister. Some people may have thought that there was not strength enough of character in the girl,"there's no colour, no devil in the child," Mr. Boutell one day remarked of her to Alfred, who said she was the prettiest girl in Hamerton. But then we don't want deep colour in all flowers. And, at least, she would be the more likely to reflect the character of the good minister who should ever be so felicitous as to call this fair lily his own.

In her religion the good little creature was exceedingly anthropomorphite, and, with as much simplicity as ever Hebrew or Greek, fashioned the Godhead from man. Heaven, to her, was much such a place as Hamerton parsonage on a grand scale, only with no chair empty at breakfast, and with no poor hovels visible from the windows. The saints and angels were exactly such people as papa and Mr. Magney, if, indeed, all of them were quite as good; and she knew what eyes they had, and with what rich low

voices they spoke. As she knew two such ministers as her papa and Mr. Magney, nothing could be easier for her than to believe most trustfully “in one God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord." All her faith rested in unquestioning simplicity, yet was, perhaps, rooted sufficiently deep for all the stress likely to be made upon it. Fanny's times of highest religious exaltation were the services on Sundays and on Feast-days; especially since, during the last three years, the prayers had been read with such devoutness, and the choir had been so much improved,-though the rector had always taken pains that the choir should be good. In a very sheltered valley, where the dews fell thick, and the sunshine was very bright, this fair lily had developed with a very gentle and bewitching grace.

A day or two had passed since the little orphan Polly had been left at Mrs. Jannings's, and Miss Fanny thought it would not now be too soon to call. She liked visiting the poor, and was generally regarded by them as a gentle human angel, too different from their coarse