those English!), had no difficulty in accepting U.T.'s "passionately."
_Passion_ in U.T.! Well, to us it was a splendid joke. I sometimes
wonder whether the vicar, too, at times, had lucid intervals of the
bare, naked reality. He had a fine sense of humour, and he would have
considered it a baseness to laugh at the poor thing, with its pretence
of passion, trying to screen its forlornness. What U.T. felt was not the
passion for music, but just the soothing, comforting sense of being at
home with us, of being accepted as one of ourselves, of not being
"scoulded," of indisputable respectability, of being thought capable of
"passion," even so ethereal a passion as that of music. How blessed
those hours must have been to U.T.! He sometimes missed them. But it
never was my father's fault. Was it U.T.'s? Well, we children had no
idea that he drank. But now, of course, I know that when U.T. did not
appear on a Sunday, he must have been "hard at it" on Saturday; and into
the kingdom of heaven he must have taken the Sundays, not the Saturdays.

Forgive all this. But I have been so much touched with your taking up my
reference to the dear old Vicar of Braddan that I could not help
extending the portrait a little.

And for the backsliders, the "weak brethren, the outcasts--aw! let's
feel for the lek, and 'keep a houl' o' their ban.'"

Do write again. You will do me so much good.


VISIONS
[Sidenote: _Calverley_]

In lone Glenartney's thickets lies crouched the lordly stag,