when all was said that Elly’s fervid eloquence could say, the rector remained unresponsive and unshaken. ‘One might as well try to get an answer out of a stone wall,’ Elly cried, in hot exasperation to her aunt. ‘Oh, my dear, didn’t I tell you so? I told poor Jack so and he believed me, but you would not believe me. He will never, never consent.’ ‘Then he shall never, never be asked any more!’ cried Elly, in her indignation. But this was a thing which it was not practicable to carry out. He was asked again and again, and continued to be asked until the time when Elly should come of age, and then she was determined to take her own way. ‘I am disappointed in papa,’ she wrote to John, ‘but it is not out of his heart he does it. He has not a word to say for himself. When I have showed him the question in a just light, and proved that all their objections are prejudice and nonsense, he just goes back to where he was at first and shakes his head. But never mind. In two years’ (in a year and a half--in a year--according as time went on, for this formula was repeated on several occasions) ‘I shall be of age. You cannot say that I don’t know the world or that I am too young _then_; and they all know what I am going to do.’ John could not refuse to take comfort from this repeated and unwavering pledge. He had plunged into the preliminaries of his work without a moment’s delay, and very soon, at an age when in England most young men are only beginning to wonder what they shall do, he found himself at the head of one of the greatest undertakings in the country, the centre of endless activity. Such advancement perhaps, everything favouring, comes sooner in his profession than in any other. But nobody, except those who had seen him grow up, suspected how young Mr. Sandford really was, and even those who did know it could scarcely believe in the accuracy of their own memory. He had always been older than his years, and the great shock he had received in the discovery of his father threw him so far apart from all the thoughts and occupations of youth, that it seems to John himself like half-a-century, that age of doubt and of misery, when everything was at its lowest ebb, before the upspringing of new hope. That grave youth matured under the fire of suffering into something like a precocious middle-age, or at least the steadiest, sternest manhood. He grew to be both respected and feared before he was five-and-twenty. And, what was curious, the resemblance to his father, which had been chiefly, perhaps, in the imagination of the elders, died completely away. He became like Mrs. Sandford in these days of strong activity and doubtful hope: not severe to his men, the multitude of work-people of all classes who now laboured under him, a whole little world of clerks, engineers, artisans, and labourers in every grade. He was not severe ever: it was said indeed that he took circumstances into