Had not Dr. Corfield been ailing at this time, the mother would have accompanied her son. The possibility of damp sheets weighed heavy on her mind; and landladies who filch from the tea-caddy, with landladies' girls, pert and familiar, preparing insidious gruel and seductive cups of coffee, were the lions which her imagination conjured up as prowling for her Alick through the fastnesses of Monk Grange. Circumstances, however, were stronger than her desire; and, happily for Alick, she was perforce obliged to remain at home while her darling went out from the paternal nest to shake those limp wings of his, and bear himself up unassisted in a new atmosphere in the best way he could. It was on the cold and rainy evening of a cold and rainy summer's day that Alick arrived at Monk Grange--an evening without a sunset or a moon, stars or a landscape; painful, mournful, as those who dwell in the North Country know only too well as the tears on its face of beauty. He had driven in a crazy old gig from Wigton, and the nine miles which lay between that not too brilliant town and the desolate fell-side hamlet which he had been so fain to make his own spiritual domain had not been such as disposed him to a cheerful view of things. The rain had fallen in a steady, pitiless downpour, which seemed to soak through every outer covering and to penetrate the very flesh and marrow of the tired traveler as it pattered noisily on the umbrella and streamed over the leather apron; and the splash of the horse's hoofs through the liquid mud and broad tracts of standing water was as dreary as the "splash, splash" of Bürger's ballad. And when all this was over, and they drew up at the Blucher, with its handful of desolate gray hovels round it, the heart of the man sank at the gloomy surroundings into the midst of which he had flung himself. But the zeal of the churchman was as good a tonic for him as the best common sense, and he waited until to-morrow and broad daylight before he allowed himself to even acknowledge an impression. The warm fireside at the Blucher cheered him too, and his supper of eggs and bacon and fresh crisp havre-bread satisfied such of his physical cravings as, unsatisfied, make a man's spiritual perceptions very gaunt.