the traveller be fresh from an overworked and overworking city, he looks
upon what he deems a sheer impossibility--the residence of men living
cheerfully and happily in solitude intense. The employment of the
villagers is in the silent fields, from day to day, from year to year.
Their life has no variety, the general heart has no desire for change. It
was so with their fathers--so shall it be with their own children, if the
too selfish world will let them. The inhabitants are almost to a man poor,
humble, and contented. The cottages are clean and neat, but lowly, like
the owners. One house, and one alone, is distinguished from the rest; it
is aged, and ivy as venerable as itself clings closer there as years roll
over it. It has a lawn, an antique door and porch, narrow windows with the
smallest diamond panes, and has been called since its first stone was laid,
_the Vicarage_. Forget the village, courteous reader, and cross with me
the hospitable threshold, for here our history begins--and ends.

The season is summer--the time evening--the hour that of sunset. The big
sun goes down like a ball of fire, crimson-red, leaving at the horizon's
verge his splendid escort--a host of clouds glittering with a hundred hues,
the gorgeous livery of him they have attended. A borrowed glory steals
from them into an open casement, and, passing over, illumines for a time a
face pale even to sadness. It is a woman's. She is dressed in deepest
mourning, and is--Heaven be with her in her solitariness!--a recent widow.
She is thirty years of age at least, and is still adorned with half the
beauty of her youth, not injured by the hand of suffering and time. The
expression of the countenance is one of calmness, or, it may be,
resignation--for the tranquility has evidently been taught and learnt as
the world's lesson, and is not native there. Near her sits a man benign of
aspect, advanced in years; his hair and eyebrows white from the winter's
fall; his eye and mien telling of decline, easy and placid as the close of
softest music, and nothing harsher. Care and trouble he has never known;