and from the verge of the wood came the “who-oo, who-oo, who-oo” of the owls, a wild strange sound that mingled with the whirr and rattle of the night-jar, deep in the bracken.  The moon swam up through the films of misty cloud, and hung, a golden glorious lantern, in mid-air; and, set in the dusky hedge, the little green fires of the glowworms appeared.  He sauntered slowly up the lane, drinking in the religion of the scene, and thinking the country by night as mystic and wonderful as a dimly-lit cathedral.  He had quite forgotten the “manly young fellows” and their sports, and only wished as the land began to shimmer and gleam in the moonlight that he knew by some medium of words or color how to represent the loveliness about his way.

“Had a pleasant evening, Lucian?” said his father when he came in.

“Yes, I had a nice walk home.  Oh, in the afternoon we played cricket.  I didn’t care for it much.  There was a boy named De Carti there; he is staying with the Dixons.  Mrs. Dixon whispered to me when we were going in to tea, ‘He’s a second cousin of Lord De Carti’s,’ and she looked quite grave as if she were in church.”

The parson grinned grimly and lit his old pipe.

“Baron De Carti’s great-grandfather was a Dublin attorney,” he remarked.  “Which his name was Jeremiah M’Carthy.  His prejudiced fellow-citizens called him the Unjust Steward, also the Bloody Attorney, and I believe that ‘to hell with M’Carthy’ was quite a popular cry about the time of the Union.”

Mr. Taylor was a man of very wide and irregular reading and a tenacious memory; he often used to wonder why he had not risen in the Church.  He had once told Mr. Dixon a singular and drolatique anecdote concerning the bishop’s college days, and he never discovered why the prelate did not bow according to his custom when the name of Taylor was called at the next visitation.  Some people said the reason was lighted candles, but that was impossible, as the Reverend and Honorable Smallwood Stafford, Lord Beamys’s son, who had a cure of souls in the cathedral city, was well known to burn no end of candles, and with him the bishop was on the best of terms.  Indeed the bishop often stayed at Coplesey (pronounced “Copsey”) Hall, Lord Beamys’s place in the west.

Lucian had mentioned the name of De Carti with intention, and had perhaps exaggerated a little Mrs. Dixon’s respectful manner.  He knew such incidents cheered his father, who could never look at these subjects from a proper point of view, and, as people said, sometimes made the strangest remarks for a clergyman.  This irreverent way of treating serious things was one of the great bonds between father and son, but it tended to increase their isolation.  People said they would often have liked to asked Mr. Taylor to garden-parties, and tea-parties, and other cheap entertainments, if only he had not been such an extreme man and so queer.  Indeed, a year before,