It was one of those perfectly fine and radiant days of early summer, with a touch of easterly about the breeze, which means perhaps a drier air, and always seems to bring out the true colours of our countryside, as with a touch of ethereal golden-tinged varnish. The humid rain-washed days, so common in England, are beautiful enough, with their rolling cloud-ranges and their soft mistiness: but the clear sparkle of this brighter weather, summer without its haze, intensifying each tone of colour and sharply defining each several tint, has a special beauty of form as well as of hue. I walked with Father Payne far among the fields. He was at first in a silent mood, observing and enjoying. We passed a field carpeted with buttercups, and he said, "That's a beautiful touch, 'the flower-enamelled field'--it isn't just washed with colour, it is like hammered work of beaten gold, like the letters in old missals!" Presently he burst out into talk: "I don't want to say anything affected," he began, "but a day like this, out in the country, gives me a stronger feeling of what I can only describe as _worship_ than anything else in the world, because the scene holds the beauty of life so firmly up before you. Worship means the sense of the unmistakable presence of beauty, I am sure--a beauty great and overwhelming, which one has had no part in making--'The sea is His, and He made it, and His hands prepared the dry land. O come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker'--it's that exactly--a sense of joyful abasement in the presence of something great and infinitely beautiful. I do wish that were more clearly stated and understood and believed. Religion, as we know it in its technical sense, is so faint-hearted about it all! It has limited worship to things beautiful enough, arches and music and ceremony: and it is so afraid of vagueness, so considerate of man's feeble grasp and small outlook, that it is afraid of recognising all the channels by which that sense is communicated, for fear of weakening a special effect. I'll tell you two or three of the experiences I mean. You know old Mrs. Chetwynd, who is fading away in that little cottage beyond the churchyard. She is poor, old, ill. She can hardly be said to have a single pleasure, as you and I reckon pleasures. She just lies there in that poky room waiting for death, always absolutely patient and affectionate and sweet-tempered, grateful for everything, never saying a hard or cross word. Well, I go to see her sometimes--not as often as I ought. She shakes hands with that old knotted-looking hand of hers which has grown soft enough now after its endless labours. She talks a little--she is interested in all the news, she doesn't regret things, or complain, or think it hard that she can't be out and about. After I have been with her for two minutes, with her bright old eyes looking at me out of such a thicket, so to speak, of wrinkles,--her face simply hacked and