Indeed, at the outset, let there be a protest entered on behalf of the sinner against this unnecessary pity of the saint.  It is a part of that false halo with which enthusiastic admiration (reckless of gilding and ruinously prodigal of ochre) delights to endue the favored heads of the beati.  The saint himself countenances the folly, and meekly inclines his head (sideways) to the rays.  It is a part of the capital of the calling to look interesting.  The revered and reverend Charles Honeyman, in the hands of that acute manager, Mr. Sherrick, was bidden to sit in his pew at evening service and cough.  A qualified consumption and a moderate bronchitis are no bad substitutes for eloquence, learning, and that indiscreet piety which is so careless of feminine favor as to bring into the pulpit a robust person and to the dinner-table a healthy appetite.

But the saint, if he have a reasonable sense of his pastoral duty, gets, malgre lui, a very fair share of that open-air medicine which is supposed to be the great lack of his profession.  For if he be a clergyman in a rural parish of tolerable extent and with no great superfluity of wealth, he will not want for either air or exercise.  The George Herbert so situated finds by no means his whole round of duty in the study.  Old Mrs. Smith, sick and bedridden, lives a couple of miles from the parsonage; but the thoughtless creature actually expects a weekly visit and half-hour’s reading of certain old familiar English literature, and will remind her pastor of it, if the expected day pass without his coming.  Jones and his wife, who live in just the other direction, are wantonly apt, upon the insufficient plea of a long walk, to be missed from their wonted pew on a stormy Sunday, and must be looked up.  Little Mary Gray has not been to Sunday-school.  Cause suspected,—­insufficient shoes.  Bessy Bell, up the cross-road, quite over beyond Beman’s Farms, is likewise delinquent, from the opposite want of a bonnet.  Wilson, the cross-grained vestryman, has an idea, which never fails by Saturday night to break out into a positive rush of conviction, that the minister is neglecting his studies and “going to Rome,” if he doesn’t in the course of the week go to Wilson and carry him the Church papers and take a look at the Wilson prize-pigs.  So good Mr. Herbert never fails, in due attestation of his “abhorrence of the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities,” to foot it over the rocky hill and down across the rickety little bridge and past the poor-house farm, (where he stops on a little private business of his own, that perhaps makes a few old hearts and certainly one old coat-pocket the lighter,) and so on, a good piece, through the woods, to where Vestryman Wilson is bending over the hoe or swinging the axe, and thinking the while what an easy life the parson has of it.

Then Mr. Herbert gets the occasional tonic of a brisk walk over the hard-beaten snow, of a moonlight winter’s night.  A walk-only think of it!—­over the crisp, crunching snow, to the distant outlying hamlet of Paton’s Corner, where a few are gathered in the little school-house to hear him preach, and to give him the happy relief of a five-mile tramp home again.