He had now fully made up his mind to go into the church. While yet thinking of high academical honours, and the brighter paths of ambition, he also had dreamed of the bar. All young men I believe do, who have high abilities, a taste for labour, and scanty fortune. Senior wranglers and double-firsts, when not possessed of means for political life, usually find their way to the bar. It is on the bench of judges, not on the bench of bishops, that we must look for them in after life. Arthur, therefore, had thought of the joys of a Chancery wig, and had looked forward eagerly to fourteen hours' daily labour in the purlieus of Lincoln's Inn. But when, like many another, he found himself disappointed in his earliest hopes, he consoled himself by thinking that after all the church was the safer haven. And when he walked down to West Putford there was one there who told him that it was so. But we cannot follow him too closely in these early days. He did go into the church. He did take pupils at Oxford, and went abroad with two of them in the long vacation. After the lapse of the year, he did get his fellowship; and had by that time, with great exertion, paid half of that moiety of his debt which he had promised to liquidate. This lapse in his purposed performance sat heavy on his clerical conscience; but now that he had his fellowship he would do better. And so somewhat more than a year passed away, during which he was but little at Hurst Staple, and very little at West Putford. But still he remembered the sweetly-pensive brow that had suited so well with his own feelings; and ever and again, he heard from one of the girls at home, that that little fool, Adela Gauntlet, was as bad as a parson herself, and that now she had gone so far that nothing would induce her to dance at all. So matters stood when young Wilkinson received at Oxford a letter desiring his instant presence at home. His father had been stricken by paralysis, and the house was in despair. He rushed off, of course, and arrived only in time to see his father alive. Within twenty-four hours after his return he found himself the head of a wailing family, of whom it would be difficult to say whether their wants or their griefs were most heartrending. Mr. Wilkinson's life had been insured for six hundred pounds; and that, with one hundred a year which had been settled on the widow, was now the sole means left for the maintenance of her and her five children;--the sole means excepting such aid as Arthur might give. "Let us thank God that I have got the fellowship," said he to his mother. "It is not much, but it will keep us from starving."