himself, or had not merely been standing by its side calling to others to enter in.  Was it even as well as this with him?  Had he not been more intent on gathering a wretched flock within the rough, wool-stealing, wind-sifting, beggarly hurdles of his church, than on housing true men and women safe in the fold of the true Shepherd?  Feeding troughs for the sheep there might be many in the fields, and they might or might not be presided over by servants of the true Shepherd, but the fold they were not!  He grew humble before the Master, and the Master began to lord it lovingly over him.  He sought His presence, and found Him; began to think less of books and rabbis, yea even, for the time, of Paul and Apollos and Cephas, and to pore and ponder over the living tale of the New Covenant; began to feel that the Lord meant what He said, and that His apostles also meant what He said; forgot Calvin a good deal, outgrew the influences of Jonathan Edwards, and began to understand Jesus Christ.

Few sights can be lovelier than that of a man who, having rushed up the staircase of fame in his youth—­what matter whether the fame of a paltry world, or a paltry sect of that world!—­comes slowly, gently, graciously down in his old age, content to lose that which he never had, and careful only to be honest at last.  It had not been so with Walter Drake.  He had to come down first to begin to get the good of it, but once down, it was not long ere he began to go up a very different stair indeed.  A change took place in him which turned all aims, all efforts, all victories of the world, into the merest, most poverty-stricken trifling.  He had been a tarrer and smearer, a marker and shearer of sheep, rather than a pastor; but now he recognized the rod and leaned on the staff of the true Shepherd Who feeds both shepherds and sheep.  Hearty were the thanks he offered that he had been staid in his worse than foolish career.

Since then, he had got into a hollow in the valley, and at this moment, as he sat in his summer-house, was looking from a verge abrupt into what seemed a bottomless gulf of humiliation.  For his handsome London house, he had little better than a cottage, in which his study was not a quarter of the size of the one he had left; he had sold two-thirds of his books; for three men and four women servants, he had but one old woman and his own daughter to do the work of the house; for all quadrupedal menie, he had but a nondescript canine and a contemptuous feline foundling; from a devoted congregation of comparatively educated people, he had sunk to one in which there was not a person of higher standing than a tradesman, and that congregation had now rejected him as not up to their mark, turning him off to do his best with fifty pounds a year.  He had himself heard the cheating butcher remark in the open street that it was quite enough, and more than ever his Master had.  But all these things were as nothing in his eyes beside his inability