to look out and tell the coachman to drive round by Monk's? I want to
leave some soup."

"Monk, I presume, is a sick labourer?" said the Canon. "I hope you are
not as indiscriminate in your charities as most Ladies Bountiful."

"Mr. Jackson says this is a really deserving case. He knows all about
him, though he really is in Mr. Austyn's parish. Monk has never had
anything from the parish, and been working hard all his life, and he is
past seventy. He was breaking stones on the road a few weeks ago; but he
caught a chill or something one very cold day, and has been laid up ever
since. This is the house. Oh, Mr. Lyndsay, you should not trouble to get
out. As you are so kind, will you carry this in?"

The interior of the tiny thatched cottage was scrupulously clean and
neat, as they nearly all are in the valley, but barer and more scantily
furnished than most of them. No photographs or pictures decorated the
white-washed walls, no scraps of carpet or matting hid the red-brick
floor. The Monks were evidently of the poorest. An old piece of faded
curtain had been hung from a rope between the chimney-piece and the door
to shield the patient from the draught. He sat in a stiff wooden
arm-chair near the fire, drawing his breath laboriously. "He was better
now," said his wife, a nurse as old and as frail-looking as himself.
"Nights was the worst." His shoulders were bent, his hair white with
age, his withered features almost as coarse and as unshapely as the poor
clothes he wore. The mask had been rough-hewn, to begin with; time and
exposure had further defaced it. No gleam of intellectual life
transpierced and illumined all. It was the face of an animal--ugly,
ignorant, honest, patient. As I looked at it there came over me a rush
of the pity I have so often felt for this suffering of age in