soporific quality. I felt that there was re-proof in this. In fact, it
roused my conscience yet more, and made me doubt whether there was
anything genuine in me at all. Sometimes I felt as if I really could not
go on, but must shut up my poor manuscript, which was 'an ill-favoured
thing, sir, but mine own,' and come down from the pulpit, and beg Miss
Lizzie Payton's pardon for presuming to read it in her presence. At
length that something, or rather want of something, in her quiet
unregarding eyes, aroused a certain opposition, ambition, indignation in
me. I strove to write better, and to do better generally. Every good
sentence, I launched at her--I don't quite know whether I aimed at her
heart or her head--I fear the latter; but I know that I looked after my
arrow with a hurried glance, to see whether it had reached the mark.
Seldom, however, did I find that my bow had had the strength to arouse
Miss Lizzie from the somniculose condition which, in my bitterness, I
attributed to her. Since then I have frequently tried to bring home to
her the charge, and wring from her the confession that, occasionally,
just occasionally, she was really overpowered by the weather. But she
has never admitted more than one such lapse, which, happening in a hard
frost, and the church being no warmer than condescension, she wickedly
remarked must have been owing, not to the weight of the atmosphere, but
the weight of something else. At length, in my anxiety for
self-justification, I persuaded myself that her behaviour was a sign of
spiritual insensibility; that she needed conversion; that she looked
with contempt from the far-off table-lands of the Broad church, or the
dizzy pinnacles of snow-clad Puseyism, upon the humble efforts of one
who followed in the footsteps of the first fishers of men--for such I
tried, in my self-protection, to consider myself.

"One day, I happened to meet her in a retired lane near the village. She
was carrying a jug in her hand.