“He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.  He hath filled the hungry with good things; but the rich He hath sent empty away.”

What a message to thrill through this palace of art, with the pleasant town without, and all the great trains thundering past!  To whom is it all addressed?  The spirit of that meek religion seems to sit shivering in its gorgeous raiment, heard and heeded of none.  Yet here as everywhere there are quiet hearts that know the secret; there are patient women, kind fathers, loving children, who would think it strange and false if they were told that over their heads hangs the bright aureole of the saints.  What can we do, we who struggle faintly on our pilgrimage, haunted and misled by hovering delusions, phantoms of wealth and prosperity and luxury, that hide the narrow path from our bewildered eyes?  We can but resolve to be simple and faithful and pure and loving, and to trust ourselves as implicitly as we can to the Father who made us, redeemed us, and loves us better than we love ourselves.

LV

I have had a fortnight of perfect weather here—­the meteorologists call it by the horrible and ugly name of “anticyclone,” which suggests, even more than the word “cyclone” suggests, the strange weather said by the Psalmist to be in store for the unrighteous—­“Upon the ungodly he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, storm and tempest.”  I have often wondered what the fields would look like after a rain of snares!  The word “cyclone” by itself suggests a ghastly whorl of high vapours, and the addition of “anti” seems to make it even more hostile.  But an anticyclone in the springtime is the opening of a door into paradise.  Day after day the fields have lain calm beneath a cool and tranquil sun, with a light breeze shifting from point to point in the compass.  Day after day I have swept along the great fen-roads, descending from my little hill-range into the flat.  Day by day I have steered slowly across the gigantic plains, with the far-off farms to left and right across acres of dark plough-land, rising in dust from the feet of horses dragging a harrow.  Every now and then one crosses a great dyke, a sapphire streak of calm water between green flood-banks, running as straight as a line from horizon to horizon.  One sweeps through a pretty village at long intervals, with its comfortable yellow-brick houses, and an old church standing up grey in the sun.  It was on a day always to be marked with letters of gold in my calendar that I found the house of Bellasyze in a village in the fen.  Imagine a great red-brick wall running along by the high road, with a pair of huge gate-posts in the centre, with big stone wyverns on the top.  Inside, a little park of ancient trees, standing up among grass golden with buttercups.  A quarter of a mile away in the park, an incredibly picturesque house of red brick, with an ancient turreted gate-house, innumerable brick