OWARDS the close of the nineteenth century the parish of Tull was a genial, but angular, hamlet hung out on the north side of a midland hill, with scarcely renown enough to get itself marked on a map. Its felicities, whatever they might be, lay some miles distant from a railway station, and so were seldom regarded, being neither boasted of by the inhabitants nor visited by strangers.

But here as elsewhere people were born and, as unusual, inconspicuously born; John Pettigrove made a note of them then, and when people came in their turns to die, Pettigrove made a note of that, too, for he was the district registrar. Between whiles, like fish in a pond, they were immersed in labor until the Divine Angler hooked them to the bank, and then, as is the custom, they were conspicuously buried, and labored, presumably, no more.

The registrar was perhaps the one person who had love and praise for the simple place. He was born and bred in Tull, he had never left Tull, and at forty years of age was as firmly attached to it as the black clock to the tower of Tull Church, which never

recorded anything but twenty minutes past four. His wife Carrie, a delicate woman, was also satisfied with Tull, but as she owned two or three small pieces of house property there, her fancy may not have been entirely beyond suspicion; possession, as you might say, being nine points of the prejudice, just as it is of the law. A year or two after their marriage Carrie began to suffer from a complication of ailments that turned her into a permanent invalid. She was seldom seen out of the house, and under her misfortunes she peaked and pined, she was troublesome, there was no pleasing her. If Pettigrove went about unshaven, she was vexed; it was unclean, it was lazy, disgusting. But when he once appeared with his mustache shaven off, she was exceedingly angry; it was scandalous, it was shameful, maddening. There is no pleasing some women. What is a man to do? When he began to let it grow again and encouraged a beard, she was more tyrannical than ever.

The gray church was small and looked shrunken, as if it had sagged; it seemed to stoop down upon the

green yard. But the stones and mounds, the cypress and holly, the strangely faded blue of a door that led through the churchyard wall to the mansion of the vicar, were beautiful without pretense, and though as often as not the parson's goats used to graze among the graves and had been known to follow him into the nave, there was about the ground, the indulgent dimness under the trees, and the tower with its unmoving clock, the very delicacy of solitude. It inspired compassion and not cynicism as, peering as it were through the glass of antiquity, the stranger gazed upon its mortal register. In its peace, its beauty, and its age all those pious records and hopes inscribed upon its stones seemed not uttered in pride or all in vain. But, to speak truth, the church's grace was partly the achievement of its lofty situation. A road climbing up from sloping fields turned abruptly and traversed the village, sidling up to the church; there, having apparently satisfied some itch of curiosity, it turned abruptly again and trundled back another way into that northern prospect of farms and forest that lay in the direction of Whitewater Copse, Hangman's Corner, and One O'Clock.

It was that prospect which most delighted Pettigrove, for he was a simple-minded countryman, full of ambling content. Not even the church allured him so much, for though it pleased him and it was just at his own threshold, he never entered it at all. Once upon a time there had been talk of him joining the church choir, for he had a pleasant singing voice, but he would not go.

"It 's flying in the face of Providence," cried his exasperated wife.

Her mind, too, was a falsetto one. "You've as strong a voice as any one in Tull, in fact stronger. Not that that is saying much, for Tull air don't seem good for songsters, if you may judge by that choir. The air is too thick, maybe; I can't say. It certainly oppresses my own chest. Or perhaps it 's too thin. I don't thrive on it myself, but you 've the strength, and it would do you credit; you 'd be a credit to yourself, and it would be a credit to me. But that won't move you! I can't tell what you 'd be at; a drunken man 'ull get sober again, but a fool-well, there!"

John, unwilling to be a credit, would mumble an objection to being tied down to that sort of thing. That was just like him, no spontaneity, no tidiness in his mind. Whenever he addressed himself to any discussion, he had, as you might say, to tuck up his intellectual sleeves, give a hitch. to his argumentative trousers. So he went on singing, just when he had a mind to it, old country songs; for he disliked what he called "gimcrack ballads about buzzums and roses."

Pettigrove's occupation dealt with the extreme features of existence, but he himself had no extreme notions. He was a good medium type of man mentally and something more than that physically, but nevertheless he was a disappointment to his wife: he never gave her any opportunity to shine by his reflected light. She had nurtured foolish ideas of him first as a figure of romance, then of some social importance; he ought to be a parish councilor or develop eminence somehow in their way of life. But John was nothing like this. He did not develop or shine or offer counsel; he was just a big, solid, happy man.

There were times when his childless wife hated every ounce and sign of him, when his fair clipped beard and hair, which she declared were the color of jute, and his stolidity sickened her.

"I do my duty by him and, please God, I'll continue to do it. I'm a humble woman and easily satisfied. An afflicted woman has no chance, no chance at all," she said. After twelve years of wedded life Pettigrove sometimes wondered what it would have been like not to have married anybody.

One Michelmas a small house belonging to Mrs. Pettigrove was let to a widow from Eastbourne. Mrs. Cronshaw was a fine, upstanding woman, gracefully grave and, as the neighbors said, clean as a pink. For several evenings after she had taken possession of the house Pettigrove, who was a very handy sort of man, worked upon some alterations to her garden, and at the end of the third or fourth evening she had invited him into her bower to sip a glass of some cordial, and she thanked him for his labors.

"Not at all, Mrs. Cronshaw." And he drank to her very good fortune. The next evening she did the same, and the very next evening to that again. And so it was not long before they spoke of themselves to each other, turn and turn about, as you might say. She was the widow of an ironmonger who had died two years before, and the ironmonger's very astute brother had given her an annuity in exchange for her interest in the business. Without family and with few friends, she had been lonely. "But Tull is such a hearty place," she said. "It's beautiful. One might forget to be lonely."

"Be sure of that," commented Petti

grove. They had the light of two candles and a blazing fire. She grew kind and more communicative to him, a strangely, a strangely, disturbingly attractive woman, dark, with an abundance of well dressed hair and a figure of charm. She had carpet all over her floor; nobody else in Tull dreamed of such a thing. She did not cover her old dark table with a cloth, as everybody else habitually did. The pictures on the wall were real, and the black-lined sofa had cushions on it of violet silk, which she sometimes actually sat upon. There was a dainty dresser with china and things, a bureau, and a tall clock that told the exact time. But there was no music; music made her melancholy. In Pettigrove's home there were things like these, but they were not the same. His bureau was jammed in a corner, with flower-pots upon its top; his pictures comprised two photo prints of a public park in Swansea. His wife had bought them at an auction sale. Their dresser was a cumbersome thing, with knobs and hooks and jars and bottles, and the tall clock never chimed the hours. The very arm-chairs at Mrs. Cronshaw's were wells of such solid comfort that it made him feel uncomfortable to use them.

"Ah, I should like to be sure of it!" she continued. "I have not found kindly people in the cities. They do not even seem to notice a fine day! I have not found them anywhere; so why should they be in Tull? You are a wise man. Tell me, is Tull the exception?"

"Yes, Mrs. Cronshaw. You must come and visit us whenever you 've a mind to; have no fear of loneliness."

"Yes, I will come and visit you," she declared. "Soon; I will."

"That 's right; you must visit us.

"Yes, soon. I must," she repeated.

But weeks passed over, and the widow did not keep her promise, although she lived only a furlong from his door. Pettigrove made no further invitation, for he found excuses on many evenings to visit her. It was easy to see that she did not care for his wife, and he did not mind this, for neither did he care for her now. The old wish that he had never been married crept back into his mind, a sly, unsavory visitant. It was complicated by a thought that his wife might not live long, a dark, shameful thought that nevertheless trembled into hope. So on many of the long winter evenings, while his wife dozed in her bed, he sat in the widow's room talking of things that were strange and agreeable. She could neither understand nor quite forgive his parochialism; this was sweet flattery to him. He had scarcely ever set foot outside a ten-mile radius of Tull, but he was an intelligent man, and all her discourse was of things he could perfectly understand. For the first time in his life Pettigrove found himself lamenting the dullness of existence. He tried to suppress this tendency, but words would come, and he was distressed. He had always been in love with things that lasted, that had stability, that gave him a recognition and guidance; but now his feelings were flickering, like grass in a gale.

"How strange that is!" she said, when he told her this. "We seem to have exchanged our feelings. I am happy here, but I know that dark thought, yes, that life is a dull journey on which the mind searches for variety, unvarying variety."

"But what for?" he cried.

"It is constantly seeking change."

"But for why? It seems like treachery to life."

"It may be so, but if you seek, you find."

"What?"

"Whatever you are seeking." "What am I seeking?"

"Not to know that is the blackest treachery to life. We are growing old," she added inconsequently, stretching her hands to the fire. She wore black silk mittens.

"Perhaps that 's it," he allowed, with a laugh. "Childhood 's best." "Surely not," she protested.

"Ah, but I was gay enough then. I'm not a religious man, you know, and perhaps that 's the reason; but, however, I can remember things of great joy and pleasure then."

And it seemed from his recollections that not the least pleasant and persistent was his memory of the chapel, a Baptist hall long since closed and decayed, to which his mother had sent him on Sunday afternoons. It was a plain, tough little tabernacle, with benches of deal, plain deal, very hard, covered with a clear varnish that smelled pleasant. The platform and its railing, the teacher's desk, the pulpit, were all of deal, the plainest deal, very hard, and all covered with the clear varnish that smelled very pleasant. And somehow the creed and the teacher and the attendants were like that, too, all plain and hard, covered with a varnish that was pleasant. But there was a way in which the afternoon sun beamed through the cheap windows that lit up for young Pettigrove an everlasting light. There were hymns with tunes that he hoped would be sung in paradise. The texts, the stories, the admonitions of the teachers, were vivid and evidently