She was shown into a small study, where Mr. Fuller sat. She told him her name, that she had been to his week-evening service with Mattie, and that the child was ill and wanted to see him. "Thank you very much," said Mr. Fuller. "Some of the city clergymen have so little opportunity of being useful! I am truly grateful to you for coming to me. A child in my parish is quite a godsend to me--I do not use the word irreverently--I mean it. You lighten my labor by the news. Perhaps I ought to say I am sorry she is ill. I dare say I shall be sorry when I see her. But meantime, I am very glad to be useful." He promised to call the next day; and, after a little more talk, Lucy took her leave. Mr. Fuller was a middle-aged man, who all his conscious years had been trying to get nearer to his brethren, moved thereto by the love he bore to the Father. The more anxious he was to come near to God, the more he felt that the high-road to God lay through the forest of humanity. And he had learned that love is not a feeling to be called up at will in the heart, but the reward as the result of an active exercise of the privileges of a neighbor. Like the poor parson loved of Chaucer, "he waited after no pomp ne reverence;" and there was no chance of preferment coming in search of him. He was only a curate still. But the incumbent of St. Amos, an old man, with a grown-up family, almost unfit for duty, and greatly preferring his little estate in Kent to the city parsonage, left everything to him, with much the same confidence he would have had if Mr. Fuller had been exactly the opposite of what he was, paying him enough to live upon--indeed, paying him well for a curate. It was not enough to marry upon, as the phrase is, but Mr. Fuller did not mind that, for the only lady he had loved, or ever would love in that way, was dead; and all his thoughts for this life were bent upon such realizing of divine theory about human beings, and their relation to God and to each other, as might make life a truth and a gladness. It was therefore painful to him to think that he was but a _city_ curate, a being whose thirst after the relations of his calling among his fellows reminded himself of that of the becalmed mariner, with "water, water everywhere, but water none to drink." He seemed to have nothing to do with them, nor they with him. Perhaps not one individual of the crowds that passed his church every hour in the week would be within miles of it on the Sunday; for even of those few who resided near it, most forsook the place on the day of rest, especially in the summer; and few indeed were the souls to whom he could offer the bread of life. He seemed to himself to be greatly overpaid for the work he had it in his power to do--in his own parish, that is. He had not even any poor to minister to. He made up for this by doing his best to help the clergyman of a neighboring parish, who had none but poor; but his