Boys and girls in plenty, home from school and boiling over with long-suppressed energy, sat gloomily surveying the prospect, and feeling themselves defrauded. They understood Christmas to mean fun and frolic, notably such as a good, sharp frost brings with it. A Christmas with such weather seemed to have no real ring about it. Where was the good of getting stout nails inserted to roughen boot soles for sliding, of furbishing old or purchasing new skates, if the thin coat of ice on the pond had all disappeared, with no signs of renewal? There had been a few flakes of feathery snow two days ago, but these had changed for sleet, and this for drizzle. The disgusted lads flung aside their skates; the girls, far better off under the circumstances, applied themselves to exclusively feminine occupations and secret preparations for the Christmas-tree. One boy said, gloomily, that he had spent his time in watching the changes out of doors, and stated, for the benefit of his compeers, that these consisted of two varieties only, "squash and splash," —otherwise, as he condescended to explain, of constant drizzle, with a ground accompaniment of thick mud; and steady downpour, with an equally liberal supply of thin ditto. The very horses, as they plodded wearily homeward through country lanes, dragging the wheels along deep ruts temporarily filled with mire, would have joined the human chorus if they could, and declared that such weather was "not a bit like Christmas." Perhaps, if there was one individual who felt this more deeply than his neighbours, yet without saying it, the Rev. Arthur Worsley Glyn, curate of Little Cray, was the person. He did not say this, for two reasons; firstly, because he was alone, and pacing in somewhat melancholy fashion up and down his study; secondly—though this was really the stronger reason of the two—because he was not a man given to grumbling, either aloud or in his secret heart, about what could not be cured. I will leave him here whilst I tell his story as briefly as I can. The Rev. Arthur, in his thirty years of life, had experienced some pretty rough travelling. His path thus far had been none of the smoothest, and the real hardship lay, not in the fact that difficulties had to be overcome, but in the knowledge that needless impediments had been placed in his way by the very hand which should rather have removed them. It sometimes happens that the evil example of a parent is so overruled for good that the son shrinks with horror from the sin which has brought about domestic shipwreck; that having no earthly father to look up to, no paternal arm to lean upon or hand to guide, children seek more earnestly, and with a greater sense of need, the love of the Heavenly Father, the support of the everlasting arms. It had been so with Arthur Glyn, and from his very boyhood his mother and two young sisters had looked to him as the staff and comfort of their home, rather than to its nominal head.