I passed along the church to the northern door, and went out.  The churchyard lay in bright sunshine.  All the rain and gloom were gone.  “If one could only bring this glory of sun and grass into one’s hope for the future!” thought I; and looking down I saw the little boy who aspired to paint the sky, looking up in my face with mingled confidence and awe.

“Do you trust me, my little man?” thought I.  “You shall trust me then.  But I won’t be a priest to you, I’ll be a big brother.”

For the priesthood passes away, the brotherhood endures.  The priesthood passes away, swallowed up in the brotherhood.  It is because men cannot learn simple things, cannot believe in the brotherhood, that they need a priesthood.  But as Dr Arnold said of the Sunday, “They do need it.”  And I, for one, am sure that the priesthood needs the people much more than the people needs the priesthood.

So I stooped and lifted the child and held him in my arms.  And the little fellow looked at me one moment longer, and then put his arms gently round my neck.  And so we were friends.  When I had set him down, which I did presently, for I shuddered at the idea of the people thinking that I was showing off the clergyman, I looked at the boy.  In his face was great sweetness mingled with great rusticity, and I could not tell whether he was the child of gentlefolk or of peasants.  He did not say a word, but walked away to join his aunt, who was waiting for him at the gate of the churchyard.  He kept his head turned towards me, however, as he went, so that, not seeing where he was going, he stumbled over the grave of a child, and fell in the hollow on the other side.  I ran to pick him up.  His aunt reached him at the same moment.

“Oh, thank you, sir!” she said, as I gave him to her, with an earnestness which seemed to me disproportionate to the deed, and carried him away with a deep blush over all her countenance.

At the churchyard-gate, the old man-of-war’s man was waiting to have another look at me.  His hat was in his hand, and he gave a pull to the short hair over his forehead, as if he would gladly take that off too, to show his respect for the new parson.  I held out my hand gratefully.  It could not close around the hard, unyielding mass of fingers which met it.  He did not know how to shake hands, and left it all to me.  But pleasure sparkled in his eyes.

“My old woman would like to shake hands with you, sir,” he said.

Beside him stood his old woman, in a portentous bonnet, beneath whose gay yellow ribbons appeared a dusky old face, wrinkled like a ship’s timbers, out of which looked a pair of keen black eyes, where the best beauty, that of loving-kindness, had not merely lingered, but triumphed.

“I shall be in to see you soon,” I said, as I shook hands with her.  “I shall find out where you live.”

“Down by the mill,” she said; “close by it, sir.  There’s one bed in our garden that always thrives, in the hottest summer, by the plash from the mill, sir.”