fulfil their office; his mind even shows signs of the weakness and wanderings of old age; but his heart is young, and I verily believe he looks forward to the hour of his release with hopes as high and expectations as ardent as those with which, in college, he anticipated the hour of his graduation.  This was the man, patriarch of the Church, who has lived to see the children he baptized grow up, go forth into the world, many die and be buried; who has baptized the second and even the third generation, and has seen Wheathedge grow from a cross-road to a flourishing village; who this afternoon, perhaps for the last time—­I could not help thinking so as I sat in church—­interpreted to us the love of Christ as it is uttered to our hearts in this most sacred and hallowed of all services.  Very simply, very gently, quite unconsciously, he refuted the cheerless doctrine of the morning sermon, and pointed us to the Protestant doctrine of the Real Presence.  Do you ask me what he said?  Nothing.  It was by his silence that he spoke.

A few tender, loving, reverential words as he broke the bread.  Three minutes of silver speech, the rest of his part of the service a golden silence.  But those few words were radiant with the presence and the love of a risen, a living Saviour.  It was not of the Christ that died, but of the Christ that now lives, and intercedes, and guides, and preserves, and saves, he spoke, with voice feeble with old age, but strong with love.  And as he spoke, it seemed to me, I think it seemed to all of us, that the Christ he loved so much and served so faithfully was close at hand, near and ready to bless us all, not with a sacred memory only, but with a Real Presence, the more real because unseen.

“Yes, Jennie,” said I after we had sat for a few minutes in silence recalling that sacred hour, “Yes, Jennie, there was a Real Presence in Father Hyatt’s breaking and blessing of the bread.  But what do you say of the disquisition of Mr. Work on transubstantiation which followed it?”

“I didn’t hear it, John.  Was it really about transubstantiation?  Perhaps I ought to have listened—­but I could not, I did not want to.  A higher, holier voice was speaking to me.  I was absorbed in that.  I was thinking how of old time Christ appeared in the breaking of bread to the disciples whose eyes were holden.  And to-night, John, as I have been rocking baby to sleep I have been reading Tennyson’s Holy Grail, and thinking how often, in our modern life, Calabad and Percivale kneel at the same shrine, and how often what is but a memorial service to the one affords a beatific vision of a living and life-giving Lord to the other.”

And Jennie repeated in a low soft voice a verse from that strange poem, whose meaning, I sometimes think, is but half understood even by its admirers: