Now, Mr. St. John, as I have said, was a member of the same college, and had served the parish of Brentburn for twenty years, and what was to Roger Mildmay an adventure, a very doubtful experiment, would have been to him life and living; and next on the list of eligible persons after Mr. Mildmay was the Rev. John Ruffhead, who was very anxious to marry and settle, and was a clergyman's son well trained to his work. Such injustices are everywhere around us; they are nobody's fault, we say--they are the fault of the system; but what system would mend them it is hard to tell. And, on the other hand, perhaps neither Mr. St. John nor Mr. Ruffhead had the same high object before them as Roger had. The old man would have gone on in his gentle routine just as he had done all those years, always kind, soothing the poor folk more than he taught them; the young man would, though sure to do his duty, have thought perhaps more of the future Mrs. Ruffhead, and the settling down, than of any kind of heroic effort to realize life and serve the world. So that on the whole, ideally, my _dilettante_ had the highest ideal; though the practical effect of him no one could venture to foretell. He had decided to accept the living of Brentburn at once, feeling the offer to be a kind of answer of the oracle--for there was a certain heathenism mingling with his Christianity--to his long-smouldering and unexpressed desires; but before concluding formally he went, by the advice of one of his friends, to look at the place, "to see how he would like it." "Like it! do I want to like it?" he said to himself. Must this always be the first question? Was it not rather the first possibility held out to him in the world--of duty, and a real, necessary, and certain work which should not be to please himself? He did not want to like it. Now, men of Mildmay's turn of mind are seldom deeply devoted to nature. They admire a fine landscape or fine sunset, no doubt, but it is chiefly for the composition, the effects of light and shade, the combination of colours. In the loveliest country they sigh for picture galleries and fine architecture, and cannot please themselves with the mists and the clouds, the woods and the waters, the warm, sweet, boundless atmosphere itself, in which others find beauty and mystery unceasing. Yet on this occasion a different result took place; although it was contrary to his own principles, when he first came out of the prosaic little railway at Brentburn and saw at his right hand, one rich cloud of foliage rounding upon another, and all the wealth of princely trees standing up in their battalions under the full warm August sky; and on the other the sweet wild common bursting forth in a purple blaze of heather, all belted and broken with the monastic gloom of the pine-woods and ineffable blue distances of the wilder country--there suddenly fell upon him a love at first sight for this insignificant