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"Every step in the progression of existence changes our position with respect to the things about us." --JOHNSON.

FRANCIS LYDIAT had found himself fatherless at the age of ten, in the safe keeping of a practical mother, who was pleased to take prompt advantage of a means which offered itself for placing him in the Blue-coat School, and enabling him to cram his bare brown head with the knowledge he coveted. She herself, with an infant in arms--a little girl of whom Francis had retained ever since a sort of idealised remembrance--took a post as travelling companion to a rich widow. Emigrating after a short time to Australia, she continued to send him letters replete with maternal cautions. The boy's heart was always going out to his mother and sister. His recollection of his father as a consumptive clergyman, kindly, weakly, learned in his son's eyes in learning more profound than the Magi's, was beginning to diminish in intensity. Nevertheless, it came upon him with the force of a first wound to learn that his mother was about to marry again. She gave him the news curtly enough, as was her fashion.

"For Laura's sake," she wrote, "as well as out of regard for my future husband, I have consented to marry Mr. Piper. He is a kind, though a self--made man, and will give me ample means for the education of my little girl; in fact, your sister's welfare is my chief motive for becoming his wife. Laura promises to be very handsome, but she is strange and self-willed to a degree. There are times when she literally alarms me; I tremble for her future. You, my good son, give me no fear, but the one of seeing you sacrifice yourself through life. I always predicted you would enter the Church" (Francis was now in orders), "and am content for my own part that you should follow in your father's steps. But I must tell you that it is one of Laura's oddities to detest clergymen; so don't expect her approval."

This strange assertion was literally true. A year later Francis received a letter (not black-edged, albeit it contained the news of his mother's death) addressed in Laura's handwriting--a hand, for a girl of thirteen, of astonishing squareness and firmness of stroke. It was dated Melbourne, 185--, and ran thus :--

"Our mother is dead, Francis. She had a baby and died. The baby, a girl, is alive. I intend to bring it up. Mr. Piper is grieved. He is accordingly more coarse and contradictory than usual. I show no grief in his presence. The child is to be called Louisa. In my own heart I have called it Hester, after Lady Hester Stanhope, you know. I shall make it answer to that name to me."

And when Francis, at this time in his twenty-fourth year, and already entering upon that long struggle against the degradation of his fellow men in the corrupt parish under his care, wrote such a letter of sympathetic tenderness and love and brotherly solicitude as might have set an ordinarily forlorn sister crying as she read it, Laura returned such a cold answer that her correspondent, disheartened, addressed himself to his stepfather. No notice was taken of his letter, and after a time the one-sided correspondence came to an end.

I am not sure that anything short of the quality Thomson has called a "godlike magnanimity," could have enabled him to cherish--as he cherished after this--a vision of a small rosy sister, whose mutinous baby mouth he had liked so well to kiss. He had been so clearly spurned, and the quarter whence the blow came lent it a poignancy that would leave an inward bruise for ever. As for that new sister, she was most probably kept in ignorance of his existence. Yet what was there left for him to do? How could he save her? Intense in belief as in action--the one essential he held to be faith in the Faith that was a reality to him. If Laura abjured clergymen from a transcendental conception of Christianity--then he would still have taken comfort and bided his time. Had she been floundering in pitfalls of doubt, he was prepared to write reams of controversial reasoning, giving a digest of all the works on divinity published by the Parker Society, and coming down to Hugh Miller's Testimony of the Rocks. But she would not even read what he might have written. What, in point of fact, was there left for him to do? Nothing, in so far as the healing of his own sore was concerned. Everything in respect of the sores that gaped around him. Thenceforth he renounced, like the early anchorites, the want inherent in every man, from the savage to the sage, of continuing his race. He resolved that the scourings of the back lanes of London should hereafter constitute his family--the pickpockets become his brothers, the harlots his sisters. And he kept his vow.

I do not want to depict another Abbé Myriel. Habit, perhaps, as well as a natural energy which would have made him equally indefatigable in any other career, may have helped the Rev. Mr. Lydiat in his work. He had entered upon a certain groove, and found no time for resting or thinking, or even pausing. His salary would have been scouted by an Australian boundary rider. Yet even out of this he straitened himself, and kept a few wretched lives going.

Eight years of such a life. And at the end of it all what a drop in the bucket his labours represented! If from out of the slime and the squalor a few souls had been lifted, there were still struggling multitudes left behind. His impassioned preaching had in no wise changed the cast of faces procreated by vice and cunning. The soulsickening, work-annulling "Cui Bono" was confronting him with spectral importunity. If he had remained he would probably have succumbed in mind. Gaunt in person at this time, with the strange air that a mind matured by contact with the old misery of the world, new born in every generation, imparts to a youthful face, he looked fit subject for Wordsworth's description of "A noticeable man, with large grey eyes." Looking thus, and carrying besides in his thin cheeks a colour that betrayed the existence of the germs of consumption--of which, as I have said, his father had died--he made application to be sent to Australia. It was now imperative that he should take a sea voyage. Curates of his stamp were wanted in the colonies. He was promised clerical work in Victoria, and took passage for Melbourne in the Henrietta Maria. This is how he comes to be standing on the forecastle this afternoon, and how it happens that on the eve of a new life he is reviewing the old one.

For the voyage in more than one respect has revolutionised his being. He can see himself, three months back, creeping on board with the burden of his fruitless toil still weighing him down, apathetic as to his recovery, dimly conscious only of a longing to find that little sister to whose image he still clings, that she may look at him perchance with his mother's eyes before he dies. He can see himself a month later, amazed at his own increasing bulk, not comprehending aright the new zest for life that stirs his pulses, as he wakes after his blissful nights of unbroken sleep. He can see himself again famished at breakfast-time, hungry at lunch time, unblushingly hearty by the time the first dinner-bell rings, and almost shamefacedly searching for a ship-biscuit before turning in for the night. Remembering the rank atmosphere he has left behind him, and the poor souls still steeped in it, his sense of well-being brings a pang in its wake. He would fight off this gross content were it possible. Yet it assails him in a fleshly sense, notwithstanding. Compared with his erewhile meagre exterior, the Rev. Mr. Lydiat is actually becoming plump. He has some trouble in recognising the handsome stranger who looks at him with lathered cheeks from the glass before which he is accustomed to shave.

Only contrast, as he is doing now, these two pictures! The picture of red--rimmed, blear, vice-haunted eyes, bestowing grudging glances upon him for eight dragging years, as he pours forth the eloquence of a heart big with compassion, and the picture of an assemblage of innocent child faces turned towards him, and (for it is beneath you to stoop to self-deception, Mr. Lydiat) the picture above all others of a pair of eyes that overcome him with a sensation of heavenly martyrdom, because he still looks away from them--believing that they are absorbing his meaning into the soul of their possessor. He was not only reviewing his past life now--he had faced the truth at last, feeling that the time had come for him to decide upon one of two courses.

The Organum, I need hardly say, lay by this time with fluttering leaves at his feet. Rules that may be applied with wonderful precision for the establishing of natural phenomena are impotent in their dealing with that most unsearchable phenomenon of all--a human heart. The first of these two courses was prompted by an instinct that for a short space gained the mastery over him. It told him that it was no mere blind adoration of a fine pair of eyes and a well-moulded figure that held him in thrall. It was a sentiment that seemed, on the contrary, interwoven with the nobler part of his being. You see he had reached a ripe age for the experiencing of a first love, and it is a matter of fact that any visitation of the sort deferred beyond its legitimate epoch gathers proportionately in intensity. Measles, chicken--pox, and calf-love are apt to assume forms that leave no lasting scars--under age. But they may shake a matured frame very considerably; and calf-love especially--retaining nothing of the calf-period but the desire to worship the divinity that has stirred it--may be prolonged into a love durable as life itself, with all its exaggerations, its short intervals of rapture, its checks, and its aspirations. Following his instinct, the Rev. Mr. Lydiat would put an end to this purgatorial phase of a first passion in the simplest and most natural way. He had hitherto avoided Sara. Now he would find means to talk to her often. He would not let her leave the ship without telling her how dear she had become to him. It was true that he was poor; but he had barely reached his prime. And how he had increased in vigour! What power he seemed to feel! What! He had worked almost from boyhood among influences so depressing that, save for his religion, the world might well have appeared to him one lump of sentient depravity; and now should he not strive for some of the sweets in his turn! Imagine those eyes always in front of his as he preached to his new congregation in Australia, with no longer a necessity for shunning their inspiration with the ferocious determination of St. Augustine. I think he pressed his hand upon his eyes at this point. There was a radiance in such a vision that made his temples throb to contemplate. It could in no wise be associated with the world as he had hitherto known it.

No, he could not promise to pluck this human love out of his heart--but he took Heaven to witness that it should not enervate him, his enthusiasm should not slacken. He would train himself from to-day to the anticipation of beholding Sara, beloved, rich, and magnificent here below, bearing as his cross the certainty that his devotion could never be of benefit to her. He had, besides, an object that, in relation to his human affection, he would never rest until he had achieved. He must find his sister, and move her heart--towards him if it were possible; but beyond and above all else, towards Christ. Still, for instinct gave him one parting thrust, he felt as if the merest sign that his love might have been in part returned would have enabled him to turn more resignedly into the course that he had resolved to follow. It could not but be pardonable to hope for such a sign before the end of the voyage, but then there could be no possible justification for seeking it.

I am afraid his cogitations made him heedless of the bell that clanked for the second time below, despite the promptitude with which he had obeyed its calls during the early part of the voyage. While he had been thinking out his position, the fleecy haze that obscured the border-line of the ocean to the westward had been gathering a pale rose-colour, that was fast tinting the watery atmosphere. He had been standing all this time with his elbows leaning on the bulwarks, and his hands covering his face. Now, as he removed them, a sudden stream of amber light enveloped him, and softened his resolute expression into a radiant calm. The clouds fronting him were turning from pink to salmon-colour, and from salmon-colour to the purest gold. Small wonder that their glory transfigured him for the instant, though I am inclined to think that inward act of renouncement invested him with a luminousness which would remain long after the sunset had quite died out of the sky, and which was dependent for its intensity upon no refracted beams of mere solar light.