the customs-house officers, who durst not approach that line of boiling foam in their larger craft. Abner Tresithny had grown up at St. Bride’s Bay, and was known to every soul there and in the neighbouring parish of St. Erme, where Farmer Teazel’s farm lay. Perhaps no man was more widely beloved and respected than he, and yet he was often regarded with a small spice of contempt--especially amongst the men-folk; and those who were fullest of the superstitions of the time and locality were the readiest to gibe at the old gardener as being a “man of dreams and fancies”--a mystic, they might have called it, had the word been familiar to them--a man who seemed to live in a world of his own, who knew his Bible through from end to end a sight better than the parson did--leastways the parson of St. Bride’s--and found there a vast deal more than anybody else in the place believed it to contain. To-night an unwonted gravity rested upon Abner’s thoughtful face--a shadow half of sorrow, half of triumphant joy, difficult to analyse; and sometimes, as he paused in the long ascent and wiped the moisture from his brow, his eyes would wander towards the sea lying far below, over which the moon was shining in misty radiance, marking a shimmering silver track across it from shore to horizon, and he would say softly to himself-- “And she will soon know it all--all the mysteries we have longed to penetrate. All will be known so soon to her. God be with her! The Lord Jesus be near her in His mercy and His love in that struggle! O my God, do Thou be near her in that last hour, when flesh and heart do fail! Let not her faith be darkened! Let not the enemy prevail against her! Do Thou be very very near, dear Lord. Do Thou receive her soul into Thy hands.” And after some such softly breathed prayer, during which his eyes would grow dim and his voice husky, he would turn his face once more towards the upland farm and resume his walk thither. The firing of the guns, which told him the ceremony was over, met his ears just as he reached the brow of the hill, and he began to meet the cottagers and fisher-folk streaming away. They all greeted him by name, and he returned their greetings gently: but he could not refrain from a gentle word of reproof to some whose potations had been visibly too deep, and who were still roaring their foolish chant as they staggered together down the slippery slope. Abner was known all round as an extraordinary man, who, whilst believing in an unseen world lying about us as no one else in the community did, yet always set his face quietly and resolutely against these time-honoured customs of propitiating the unseen agencies, which formed such a favourite pastime in the whole country. It was a combination altogether beyond the ken of the rustic mind, and encircled Abner with a halo of additional mystery.