He arrived, to assume his duties, in the waning light of a soft January day. Bontigo’s van set him down, with a carpet-bag, bandbox, and chest of books, at the door of the lodgings which Deacon Snowden had taken for him. The house stood in the North Street, as it is called. It was a small, yellow-washed building, containing just half a dozen rooms, and of these the two set apart for the minister looked straight upon the harbor. Under his sitting-room window was a little garden, and at the end of the garden a low wall, with a stretch of water beyond it and a bark that lay at anchor but a stone’s throw away, as it seemed, its masts overtopping the misty hillside that closed the view. A green painted door was let into the garden wall--a door with two flaps, the upper of which stood open; and through this opening he caught another glimpse of gray water. The landlady, who showed him into this room and at once began to explain that the furniture was better than it looked, was hardly prepared for the rapture with which he stared out of the window. His boyhood had been spent in a sooty Lancashire town, and to him the green garden, the quay door, the bark, and the stilly water seemed to fall little short of Paradise. “I reckoned you’d like it,” she said. “An’, to be sure, ’tis a blessing you do.” He turned his stare upon her for a moment. She was a benign-looking woman of about fifty, in a short-skirted gray gown and widow’s cap. “Why do you say that?” “Because, leavin’ out the kitchen, there’s but four rooms, two for you an’ two for me; two facin’ the harbor, an’ two facin’ the street. Now, if you’d took a dislike to this look-out I must ha’ put you over the street an’ moved in here mysel’. I do like the street, too, there’s so much more doin’.” “I think this arrangement will be better in every way,” said the young minister. “I’m main glad. Iss, there’s no denyin’ that I’m main glad. From upstairs you can see right down the harbor, which is prettier again. Would’ee like to see it now? O’ course you would--an’ it’ll be so much handier for answerin’ the door, too. There’s a back door at the end o’ the passage. You’ve only to slip a bolt an’ you’m out in the garden--out to your boat, if you choose to keep one. But the garden’s a tidy little spot to walk up an’ down in an’ make up your sermons, wi’ nobody to overlook you but the folk next door, an’ they’m churchgoers.” [Illustration]