As the chimes struck six o’clock, he quietly withdrew, and passed from the scenes of pleasure and feasting to those of sickness and of mourning. If he had regarded the former with complacent joy, he was not the less willing, nor the less prepared, to cheer the latter with those high contemplations and those tender sympathies to which, by faith, as a Christian, he could point, and which, in charity, as a man, he truly felt. Of the old, who were confined to their own thresholds, he found two or three cross and short, but most of them garrulous, and in good humour. They had got pleasant portions from the franklin, and they could tell of old May-days, and heard, with thankful nods and ready “ayes,” and strong fetchings of the breath, that were not sighs of grief, the grave good words with which he taught them how only they could die in peace. Of his flock only one lay at the point of death, and her he visited last. She was the miller’s daughter, and had been the May-queen of the bygone year. Sacred be such visit, in its most solemn communings! but we may paint the scene of it, and the trifles which belong to those sympathies of our humanity, that often survive the resigned hope of life. In a tall chair, against the back of which she leaned her head, sate a pale maiden, warmly wrapped in a robe of white woollen, close to the small window of an upper chamber, on which the evening sun shone warm: curling honey-suckles did make a frame to it; and one rose, with an opening bud, peeped from the trained bush beneath. Upon a little table near her stood a fragrant branch of May in a cup of water. There were faint flushes in her transparent cheeks, and there was an unearthly brightness in her eyes--not fitful--but a calm, steady, serene ray, that, as the declining sun poured over the damsel its yellow glories, presented her to the thoughtful gazer such as she might be when treading the celestial courts above. “And have you any other wish, my child?” said Noble, as he rose to go. “Yes, if it be not too foolish.” “Tell it, my dear.” “I would like some flowers from the May-pole strewn on my winding-sheet, and a bit of rosemary from your own garden put in my hands.” “And you shall have them,” said Noble, pressing her wan hand in his, and turning quick away. CHAP. IV. And if physitians in their art did see In each disease there was some sparke divine, Much more let us the hand of God confesse In all these sufferings of our guiltinesse. _A Treatie of Warres._ Night closed on Cheddar, without any other disturbance than a quarrel--loud and short as a thunder-storm--between the blacksmith and his old termagant wife, which, Roger being potent in liquor, terminated in a complete victory on his part; and thus silence, if not peace, was restored to the quarter in which he dwelt.