her to it longer, but for her mother’s ominously growing weakness.  The sisters were strangely overclouded by this incident.  They could not fathom the meaning of their father’s unkindness, coarseness, and indignation.  Why, and why? they asked one another, blankly.  The Scriptures were harsh in one part, but was the teaching to continue so after the Atonement?  By degrees they came to reflect, and not in a mild spirit, that the kindest of men can be cruel, and will forget their Christianity toward offending and repentant women.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Fleming had a brother in London, who had run away from his Kentish home when a small boy, and found refuge at a Bank.  The position of Anthony Hackbut in that celebrated establishment, and the degree of influence exercised by him there, were things unknown; but he had stuck to the Bank for a great number of years, and he had once confessed to his sister that he was not a beggar.  Upon these joint facts the farmer speculated, deducing from them that a man in a London Bank, holding money of his own, must have learnt the ways of turning it over—­farming golden ground, as it were; consequently, that amount must now have increased to a very considerable sum.  You ask, What amount?  But one who sits brooding upon a pair of facts for years, with the imperturbable gravity of creation upon chaos, will be as successful in evoking the concrete from the abstract.  The farmer saw round figures among the possessions of the family, and he assisted mentally in this money-turning of Anthony’s, counted his gains for him, disposed his risks, and eyed the pile of visionary gold with an interest so remote, that he was almost correct in calling it disinterested.  The brothers-in-law had a mutual plea of expense that kept them separate.  When Anthony refused, on petition, to advance one hundred pounds to the farmer, there was ill blood to divide them.  Queen Anne’s Farm missed the flourishing point by one hundred pounds exactly.  With that addition to its exchequer, it would have made head against its old enemy, Taxation, and started rejuvenescent.  But the Radicals were in power to legislate and crush agriculture, and “I’ve got a miser for my brother-in-law,” said the farmer.  Alas! the hundred pounds to back him, he could have sowed what he pleased, and when it pleased him, partially defying the capricious clouds and their treasures, and playing tunefully upon his land, his own land.  Instead of which, and while too keenly aware that the one hundred would have made excesses in any direction tributary to his pocket, the poor man groaned at continuous falls of moisture, and when rain was prayed for in church, he had to be down on his knees, praying heartily with the rest of the congregation.  It was done, and bitter reproaches were cast upon Anthony for the enforced necessity to do it.