"Those are the people your stories are generally about," said Flora. "I hope the variety will lie in the treatment. Go on. I don't care what you read." "'In a certain country, that I am not going to name, there is a parish village. In the parsonage lives a pastor; it is not I, however. This pastor faithfully serves our beloved church with the Word of God, which he preaches in truth, and with the holy sacraments, which he administers as he ought. And wherever this is done, the fruit will not be wanting; for God has promised it, and He keeps His word still, although among men there is little truth or faith any longer to be found. "'With temporal goods, however, this pastor is not specially well provided; and were it not that he has a living God in the heavens, he must many a time grow anxious and dispirited; which in truth he does not always escape, as he himself humbly confesses. For if you have a small benefice, a large family, and a couple of children at school to boot, sometimes that gives even a believer the headache; though indeed there is no need for that, were faith but strong and prayer simple enough. Now there are cultivated fields belonging to the living; but as the pastor cannot drive the plough spiritual and the plough agricultural both at once, he hires out his ground; that he may give himself the more diligently to the cultivation of hearts. From these hired-out acres comes not a small part of his scanty means, and therefore it becomes a very desirable thing that he should dispose of his ground suitably. With most of his fields, indeed, this is not difficult, for they are fruitful and favourably situated and easy to get a good tenant for them. But one of his pieces of ground, and a pretty large one, lies on the slope of a hill which is wooded at the top; this field nobody will take, because in great rains loose earth and stones come rolling down over the slope from the hill above, and in this way the whole crop may easily be destroyed. It comes to my mind that the fault probably lies at the door of the beloved Enclosings. In the course of them it might well happen that too much wood has been cleared from the hill and sold. By that means the soil has been laid bare and the rain floods can wash it off anywhere they come. At any rate, nobody wants the field; and it always gives the pastor a stab in the heart when he comes past it; and he does not content himself with thinking, but he prays too, and promises that he will give to the Lord Jesus, for the mission, a portion of the hire of the field, if only a tenant may be found for it.