His wife seconded him in everything.  She had been rather fond of society, and much admired and run after before her marriage; and the London world to which she had belonged pitied poor Fanny Evelyn when she married the young clergyman, and went to settle in that smoky hole Turley; a very nest of Chartism and Atheism, in a part of the country which all the decent families had had to leave for years.  However, somehow or other she didn’t seem to care.  If her husband’s living had been amongst green fields and near pleasant neighbours she would have liked it better—­that she never pretended to deny.  But there they were.  The air wasn’t bad, after all; the people were very good sort of people—­civil to you if you were civil to them, after the first brush; and they didn’t expect to work miracles, and convert them all off-hand into model Christians.  So he and she went quietly among the folk, talking to and treating them just as they would have done people of their own rank.  They didn’t feel that they were doing anything out of the common way, and so were perfectly natural, and had none of that condescension or consciousness of manner which so outrages the independent poor.  And thus they gradually won respect and confidence; and after sixteen years he was looked up to by the whole neighbourhood as the just man, the man to whom masters and men could go in their strikes, and in all their quarrels and difficulties, and by whom the right and true word would be said without fear or favour.  And the women had come round to take her advice, and go to her as a friend in all their troubles; while the children all worshipped the very ground she trod on.

They had three children, two daughters and a son, little Arthur, who came between his sisters.  He had been a very delicate boy from his childhood; they thought he had a tendency to consumption, and so he had been kept at home and taught by his father, who had made a companion of him, and from whom he had gained good scholarship, and a knowledge of and interest in many subjects which boys in general never come across till they are many years older.

Just as he reached his thirteenth year, and his father had settled that he was strong enough to go to school, and, after much debating with himself, had resolved to send him there, a desperate typhus fever broke out in the town.  Most of the other clergy, and almost all the doctors, ran away; the work fell with tenfold weight on those who stood to their work.  Arthur and his wife both caught the fever, of which he died in a few days; and she recovered, having been able to nurse him to the end, and store up his last words.  He was sensible to the last, and calm and happy, leaving his wife and children with fearless trust for a few years in the hands of the Lord and Friend who had lived and died for him, and for whom he, to the best of his power, had lived and died.  His widow’s mourning was deep and gentle.  She was more affected by the request of the committee