home again long before you leave us.” It is sad to me even now to think that such an old friendship, which I am sure was felt in equal strength by both men and birds, should ever have come to an end. It had to be, but it gives me pain to tell the story. The old Vicar fell into a drowsy decay, and the murmur of his sermons was heard no more in the church. A Curate took the work for him, and the old Scholar came and listened as before; but the sweet old memories of a long friendship were not to be found in those discourses, nor the flashes of light from the world’s great poets and thinkers that had been wont to keep him awake and cheer him. And at last the old shepherd died, and slept among the sheep to whose needs he had been ministering so quietly for half a century. The old Scholar, bent and withered, was there to see the last of his friend, and the Doctor and his wife looked sadly down from the tower. They never saw him again outside his own garden. A new Vicar came, a kindly, shrewd, and active man, whose sense of the right order of things was sadly wounded as he examined the church from end to end in company with his churchwardens. “You have let the fabric fall into ruin, Mr. Harding,” he said, “into ruin: I can’t use a milder word. We must scrape together what we can, and make it fit for divine worship. Let us come up into the tower and see how things are there.” The crestfallen churchwardens followed him up the well-worn stairs, but were left far behind, and his active youthful figure disappeared in front of them into the darkness. When they found him at last in the ringers’ chamber, he was kicking at a great heap of refuse accumulated on the floor in a corner. “What on earth is this, Mr. Harding?” asked the Vicar. “Who makes a kitchen-midden of the church tower?” “That there belongs to Dr. and Mrs. Jackson,” said poor Harding. “Then Dr. and Mrs. Jackson had better come and fetch it away at once!” cried the Vicar, forgetting in his indignation to ask who they were. “See about it directly, please: it is your duty as churchwarden, and if your duties have so far been neglected, you cannot do better than begin to make up for the past. I do not mean to speak harshly,” he added, seeing Mr. Harding’s grave face grow graver, “but the state of this tower is dreadful, and we must see to it at once.” Mr. Harding said nothing, but made for the staircase, disappeared from view, and went home very sad at heart. “I doubt the old Doctor and his missus will have to go,” said he. Mrs. Harding let her work drop to the floor and stared at him. “Then the old gentleman’ll have to go too,” she said. And there was consternation among all the old folks that evening.