I was on my way to the Hall to see Mr Stoddart.  I wanted to ask him whether something could not be done beyond his exquisite playing to rouse the sense of music in my people.  I believed that nothing helps you so much to feel as the taking of what share may, from the nature of the thing, be possible to you; because, for one reason, in order to feel, it is necessary that the mind should rest upon the matter, whatever it is.  The poorest success, provided the attempt has been genuine, will enable one to enter into any art ten times better than before.  Now I had, I confess, little hope of moving Mr Stoddart in the matter; but if I should succeed, I thought it would do himself more good to mingle with his humble fellows in the attempt to do them a trifle of good, than the opening of any number of intellectual windows towards the circumambient truth.

It was just beginning to grow dusk.  The wind was blustering in gusts among the trees, swaying them suddenly and fiercely like a keen passion, now sweeping them all one way as if the multitude of tops would break loose and rush away like a wild river, and now subsiding as suddenly, and allowing them to recover themselves and stand upright, with tones and motions of indignant expostulation.  There was just one cold bar of light in the west, and the east was one gray mass, while overhead the stars were twinkling.  The grass and all the ground about the trees were very wet.  The time seemed more dreary somehow than the winter.  Rigour was past, and tenderness had not come.  For the wind was cold without being keen, and bursting from the trees every now and then with a roar as of a sea breaking on distant sands, whirled about me as if it wanted me to go and join in its fierce play.

Suddenly I saw, to my amazement, in a walk that ran alongside of the avenue, Miss Oldcastle struggling against the wind, which blew straight down the path upon her.  The cause of my amazement was twofold.  First, I had supposed her with her mother in London, whither their journeys had been not infrequent since Christmas-tide; and next—­why should she be fighting with the wind, so far from the house, with only a shawl drawn over her head?

The reader may wonder how I should know her in this attire in the dusk, and where there was not the smallest probability of finding her.  Suffice it to say that I did recognise her at once; and passing between two great tree-trunks, and through an opening in some under-wood, was by her side in a moment.  But the noise of the wind had prevented her from hearing my approach, and when I uttered her name, she started violently, and, turning, drew herself up very haughtily, in part, I presume, to hide her tremor.—­She was always a little haughty with me, I must acknowledge.  Could there have been anything in my address, however unconscious of it I was, that made her fear I was ready to become intrusive?  Or might it not be that, hearing of my footing with my parishioners generally,