bachelor's round elbow-chair, with a needlework cushion at the back; a
walnut-tree bureau, another table or two, half a dozen plain chairs,
constituted the rest of the furniture, saving some two or three hundred
volumes, ranged in neat shelves on the clean wainscoted walls. There was
another room, to which you ascended by two steps, communicating with this
parlour, smaller but finer, and inhabited only on festive days, when Lady
Vargrave, or some other quiet neighbour, came to drink tea with the good
curate.

An old housekeeper and her grandson--a young fellow of about two and
twenty, who tended the garden, milked the cow, and did in fact what he
was wanted to do--composed the establishment of the humble minister.

We have digressed from Mr. Aubrey himself.

The curate was seated, then, one fine summer morning, on a bench at the
left of his porch, screened from the sun by the cool boughs of a
chestnut-tree, the shadow of which half covered the little lawn that
separated the precincts of the house from those of silent Death and
everlasting Hope; above the irregular and moss-grown paling rose the
village church; and, through openings in the trees, beyond the
burial-ground, partially gleamed the white walls of Lady Vargrave's
cottage, and were seen at a distance the sails on the--

"Mighty waters, rolling evermore."

The old man was calmly enjoying the beauty of the morning, the freshness
of the air, the warmth of the dancing beam, and not least, perhaps, his
own peaceful thoughts,--the spontaneous children of a contemplative
spirit and a quiet conscience. His was the age when we most sensitively