He arrived, to assume his duties, in the waning light of a soft January day.  Boutigo’s van set him down, with a carpet-bag, band-box, and chest of books, at the door of the lodgings which Deacon Snowden had taken for him.  The house stood in the North Street, as it is called.  It was a small, yellow-washed building, containing just half-a-dozen rooms, and of these the two set apart for the minister looked straight upon the harbour.  Under his sitting-room window was a little garden, and at the end of the garden a low wall with a stretch of water beyond it, and a barque that lay at anchor but a stone’s throw away, as it seemed, its masts stretching high against the misty hillside.  A green-painted door was let into the garden wall—­a door with two flaps, the upper of which stood open; and through this opening he caught another glimpse of grey water.

The landlady, who showed him into this room, and at once began to explain that the furniture was better than it looked, was hardly prepared for the rapture with which he stared out of the window.  His boyhood had been spent in a sooty Lancashire town, and to him the green garden, the quay-door, the barque, and the stilly water, seemed to fall little short of Paradise.

“I reckoned you’d like it,” she said.  “An’ to be sure, ’tis a blessing you do.”

He turned his stare upon her for a moment.  She was a benign-looking woman of about fifty, in a short-skirted grey gown and widow’s cap.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, leavin’ out the kitchen, there’s but four rooms, two for you an’ two for me; two facin’ the harbour, an’ two facin’ the street.  Now, if you’d took a dislike to this look-out, I must ha’ put you over the street, an’ moved in here myself.  I do like the street, too.  There’s so much more goin’ on.”

“I think this arrangement will be better in every way,” said the young minister.

“I’m glad of it.  Iss, there’s no denyin’ that I’m main glad.  From upstairs you can see right down the harbour, which is prettier again.  Would’ee like to see it now?  O’ course you would—­an’ it’ll be so much handier for me answerin’ the door, too.  There’s a back door at the end o’ the passage.  You’ve only to slip a bolt an’ you’m out in the garden—­out to your boat, if you choose to keep one.  But the garden’s a tidy little spot to walk up an’ down in an’ make up your sermons, wi’ nobody to overlook you but the folk next door; an’ they’m church-goers.”

After supper that evening, the young minister unpacked his books and was about to arrange them, but drifted to the window instead.  He paused for a minute or two with his face close to the pane, and then flung up the sash.  A faint north wind breathed down the harbour, scarcely ruffling the water.  Around and above him the frosty sky flashed with innumerable stars, and over the barque’s masts, behind the long chine of the eastern hill, a soft radiance heralded