had been known to do into other narrow souls before his.  She had given him, at least, a fine bass voice and a musical ear; but I cannot positively say whether these alone had sufficed to inspire him with the rich chant in which he delivered the responses.  The way he rolled from a rich deep forte into a melancholy cadence, subsiding, at the end of the last word, into a sort of faint resonance, like the lingering vibrations of a fine violoncello, I can compare to nothing for its strong calm melancholy but the rush and cadence of the wind among the autumn boughs.  This may seem a strange mode of speaking about the reading of a parish clerk—­a man in rusty spectacles, with stubbly hair, a large occiput, and a prominent crown.  But that is Nature’s way:  she will allow a gentleman of splendid physiognomy and poetic aspirations to sing woefully out of tune, and not give him the slightest hint of it; and takes care that some narrow-browed fellow, trolling a ballad in the corner of a pot-house, shall be as true to his intervals as a bird.

Joshua himself was less proud of his reading than of his singing, and it was always with a sense of heightened importance that he passed from the desk to the choir.  Still more to-day:  it was a special occasion, for an old man, familiar to all the parish, had died a sad death—­not in his bed, a circumstance the most painful to the mind of the peasant—­and now the funeral psalm was to be sung in memory of his sudden departure.  Moreover, Bartle Massey was not at church, and Joshua’s importance in the choir suffered no eclipse.  It was a solemn minor strain they sang.  The old psalm-tunes have many a wail among them, and the words—­

     Thou sweep’st us off as with a flood;
     We vanish hence like dreams—­

seemed to have a closer application than usual in the death of poor Thias.  The mother and sons listened, each with peculiar feelings.  Lisbeth had a vague belief that the psalm was doing her husband good; it was part of that decent burial which she would have thought it a greater wrong to withhold from him than to have caused him many unhappy days while he was living.  The more there was said about her husband, the more there was done for him, surely the safer he would be.  It was poor Lisbeth’s blind way of feeling that human love and pity are a ground of faith in some other love.  Seth, who was easily touched, shed tears, and tried to recall, as he had done continually since his father’s death, all that he had heard of the possibility that a single moment of consciousness at the last might be a moment of pardon and reconcilement; for was it not written in the very psalm they were singing that the Divine dealings were not measured and circumscribed by time?  Adam had never been unable to join in a psalm before.  He had known plenty of trouble and vexation since he had been a lad, but this was the first sorrow that had hemmed in his voice, and strangely enough it was sorrow because the chief source