with fading heather--and cutting through its plantations of larch and
Scotch fir, Tom Verity's mood sobered. He watched the country reeling
away to right and left past the carriage windows, and felt its peculiarly
English and sylvan charm. Yet he saw it all through a dazzle, as of
mirage, in which floated phantom landscapes strangely different in
sentiment and in suggestion.--Some extravagantly luxuriant, as setting to
crowded painted cities, some desert, amazingly vacant and desolate; but,
in either case, poetic, alluring, exciting, as scenes far removed in
climate, faith and civilization from those heretofore familiar can hardly
fail to be. India, and all which India stands for in English history,
challenged his imagination, challenged his ambition, since in virtue of
his nationality, young and inexperienced though he was, he went to her as
a natural ruler, the son of a conquering race. And this last thought
begot in him not only exultation but an unwonted seriousness. While, as
he thus meditated, from out the dazzle as of mirage, a single figure grew
into force and distinctness of outline, a figure which from his childhood
had appealed to him with an attraction at once sinister and heroic--that,
namely, of a certain soldier and ex-Indian official, his kinsman, to pay
a politic tribute of respect to whom was the object of his present
excursion.

In Catholic countries the World gives its children to the Church. In
Protestant countries the process is not infrequently reversed, the Church
giving its children to the World, and that with an alacrity which argues
remarkable faith and courage--of a sort! Archdeacon Verity had carefully
planned this visit for his son, although it obliged the young man to
leave home two days earlier than he need otherwise have done. It was
illuminating to note how the father brought all the resources of a fine
presence, an important manner and full-toned archidiaconal voice to bear
upon proving the expediency of the young man visiting this particular