VALLEY

THE MANSE CHILDREN 31is certain that he could not bear to scold them. "Theyhave no mother," he used to say to himself, with asigh, when some unusually glaring peccadillo forcedhis notice. But he did not know half ofitself upon their goings-on. He belonged to the sect of dreamers.The windows of his study looked out on the graveyardbut, as he paced up and down the room, reflectingdeeply on the immortality of the soul, he was quiteunaware that Jerry and Carl were playing leap-froghilariously over the flat stones in that abode of deadMethodists. Mr. Meredith had occasional acute realizationsthat his children were not so well looked after,physically or morally, as they had been before hiswife died, and he had always a dim sub-consciousnessthat house and meals were very different under AuntMartha's management from what they had been underCecilia's. For the rest, he lived in a world of booksand abstractions; and, therefore, although hisclotheswere seldom brushed, and although the Glen housewivesconcluded, from the ivory-like pallor of his clearcutfeatures and slender hands, that he never gotenough to eat, he was not an unhappy man.If ever a graveyard could be called a cheerful place,the old Methodist graveyard at Glen St. Mary mightbe so called. The new graveyard, at the other sideof the Methodist church,was a neat and proper anddoleful spot; but the old one had been leftso long toNature's kindly and gracious ministries that it hadbecome very pleasant.