_The last Essay in the volume may be taken as a hint that among other trials which a Country Parson has to bear is the necessity of acquiescing in certain unsatisfied yearnings. That sounds so very heroic now that I have written it, that I am inclined to be rather proud of my own resignation. All my life I have had a hankering to pay a visit to the United States of America. There was a time when I could have afforded the expense of such a trip, but I could not then afford to give the time. Now with an annually decreasing income the_ way _is open, but the_ means _are not forthcoming. But as I think of too many of my brethren who every day of their lives are sadly put to it to keep the wolf from the door and find it difficult to provide even the bare necessaries of life, not to speak of those comforts and simple indulgences which it is so hard to miss when old age and its infirmities have set in--the contrast between their lot and my own comes home to me almost with a sense of self-reproach. Let them whose sterner trials are so much more hard to bear than mine, forgive the irony of one who grumbles that he is too poor to cross the Atlantic on a new voyage of discovery--as though that were a serious deprivation and a proof of his being only one step from indigence. Let them do him the justice to believe that he himself is not insensible to the pathos that lurks in the background of his own lament._ CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON 1 II. THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON (_continued_) 49 III. THE CHURCH AND THE VILLAGES 97 IV. QUIS CUSTODIET 143 _Note_ 176 V. CATHEDRAL SPACE FOR NEGLECTED RECORDS 180 VI. SNOWED UP IN ARCADY 223 _Note_ 264 VII. WHY I WISH TO VISIT AMERICA 270 [_The first six essays have, in the main, appeared in the “Nineteenth Century:” the seventh first saw the light in the “North American Review.”_] I. _THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON._