doubt,’ says I; ’they aint your sons and
darters. But I can. I wouldn’t move
a foot, sir, but I’d take my chance wi’
the poor things. And, sir,’ says I, ‘we’re
all God’s childeren; and which o’ us is
he to choose, and which is he to leave out? I
don’t believe he’d know a bit better how
to choose one and leave another than I should, sir—that
is, his heart wouldn’t let him lose e’er
a one o’ us, or he’d be miserable for
ever, as I should be, if I left one o’ mine i’
the fire.’”
Here Adela had the good sense to close the door again,
yet more softly than she had opened it; and we retired.
“That’s the right sort of man,”
said I, “to get a hold of the poor. He
understands them, being himself as poor in spirit as
they are in pocket—or, indeed, I might
have said, as he is in pocket himself. But depend
upon it he comes out both ways poorer than he went
in.”
“It should not be required of a curate to give
money,” said Adela.
“Do you grudge him the blessedness of giving,
Adela?”
“Oh, no. I only think it is too hard on
him.”
“It is as necessary for a poor man to give away,
as for a rich man. Many poor men are more devoted
worshippers of Mammon than some rich men.”
And then I took her home.
THE EVENING AT THE CURATE’S.
As I led Adela, well wrapped in furs, down the steps
to put her into the carriage, I felt by the wind,
and saw by the sky, that a snowstorm was at hand.
This set my heart beating with delight, for after all
I am only what my friends call me—an old
boy; and so I am still very fond of snow and wind.
Of course this pleasure is often modified by the recollection
that it is to most people no pleasure, and to some
a source of great suffering. But then I recover
myself by thinking, that I did not send for the snow,
and that my enjoyment of it will neither increase their
pains nor lessen my sympathies. And so I enjoy
it again with all my heart. It is partly the
sense of being lapt in a mysterious fluctuating depth
of exquisite shapes of evanescent matter, falling like
a cataract from an unknown airy gulf, where they grow
into being and form out of the invisible—well-named
by the prophet Job—for a prophet he was
in the truest sense, all-seated in his ashes and armed
with his potsherd—the womb of the snow;
partly the sense of motion and the goings of the wind
through the etherial mass; partly the delight that
always comes from contest with nature, a contest in
which no vile passions are aroused, and no weak enemy
goes helpless to the ground. I presume that in
a right condition of our nervous nature, instead of
our being, as some would tell us, less exposed to
the influences of nature, we should in fact be altogether
open to them. Our nerves would be a thorough-fare
for Nature in all and each of her moods and feelings,
stormy or peaceful, sunshiny or sad. The true
