John drew his mother’s hand through his arm as she looked up in his face, with her soft features all quivering with emotion. What more could he say? She was not clever, nor very able to take a philosophical view of the matter. She never stopped to ask herself, as he did, whether this faulty, shifty, mean, unprofitable world was worth the expenditure of that divine life eighteen hundred years ago, and of the many lives since which have been half divine. All that;--and nothing better come of it than the vice, and the hypocrisy, and mercenary pretences at goodness, and brutal indifference to everything pure and true, which were to be found in this very village, in the depth of the rural country, in England that has been called Christian for all these hundreds of years. So much--and so little to result from it. Such were the thoughts that passed through John’s mind, mingled with many another gloomy fancy. Adding up long lines of figures was scarcely more unprofitable--could scarcely be of less use to the world. When he thought of his father’s precise little sermons, his feelings were different; for Dr Mitford spoke as a member of the Archæological Society might be supposed to speak, being compelled to do so, to a handful of bumpkins who could not, as he was well aware, understand a word he said--and was content with having thus performed the “duty” incumbent on him. _That_ might be mended so far as it went; but who could mend the self-devotion, the unconscious gospel of a life which his mother set before the eyes of the village? They knew that her charity never failed, nor her interest in them, nor the tender service which she was ready to give to the poorest, or even to the wickedest. Twenty-five years this woman, who was as pure as the angels, had been their servant, at their call night and day. Heaven and earth could not produce a more perfect ministration, her son said to himself, as he watched her coming and going; and yet what did it all come to? Had Mrs Mitford seen the thoughts that were going on in his mind, she would have shrunk from him with a certain horror. They were hard thoughts both of God and man. What was the good of it? Nobody, it appeared to John, was the better. If Fanshawe Regis, for one place, had been left to itself, would it have made any difference? Such thoughts are hard to bear, when a man has been trained into the habit of thinking that much, almost everything, can be done for his neighbours if he will but sufficiently exert himself. Here was a tender good woman who had exerted herself all her life--and what was the end of it? Meanwhile Mrs Mitford walked on cheerfully, holding her son’s arm, with a little glow of devotion about her heart, thinking, what did it matter how much labour was spent on the work if but the one stray lamb was brought back to the fold? and pondering in the same breath a new argument by which Robert Little, in the Doctor’s greatcoat, and his wife in one of her