Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,

Her early Heaven, her happy views;

Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse

A life that leads melodious days.

He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but

he gladly conformed to it now.

He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode

of life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the

undulations disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead

after another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down

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the milk. "I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in," she

ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of

herself. "Yes--well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his

troubles and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress

me. He is so zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from

people of a different way of thinking from himself, and I don't

like to hear of such humiliations to a man of his age, the more

particularly as I don't think earnestness does any good when carried

so far.

He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in

which he took part quite recently. He went as the deputy of some

missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a

place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate

with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere about there--son of some

landowner up that way--and who has a mother afflicted with blindness.

My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there

was quite a disturbance. It was very foolish of my father, I

must say, to intrude his conversation upon a stranger when the

probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless. But whatever

he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season;

and, of course, he makes many enemies, not only among the absolutely

vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate being bothered. He says

he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly;

but I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and

would leave such pigs to their wallowing."

Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but

she no longer showed any tremulousness. Clare's revived thoughts of

his father prevented his noticing her particularly; and so they went

on down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished

and drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took their

pails, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk. As

Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows he said to her softly-"And my question, Tessy?"




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