io VILLAGE ENGLAND 



a day stirred in the old man every Sabbatarian prejudice. 

 The children were caught red-handed, as it were. The 

 purple witness stank in his nostrils, and he would have 

 been accursed in the eyes of his own conscience if he had 

 not lifted up his voice in the cause of holiness. In a tone 

 schooled to gruff and dignified severity, he rated those 

 two little girls till they wept, for the sin which he labelled 

 &quot; violeting on the Sabbath/ Spiritually he always 

 breathed the atmosphere of the Old Testament ; and if 

 the sin of violating the Sabbath was not involved in the 

 practice of violeting on Sunday a word he never used, 

 it was perhaps too sunny and forgiving for his creed he 

 had misread his Bible these sixty years.; It was not in bis 

 school that the little girl, made to write out the creed for 

 an inspector, told of one who &quot; suffered under bunch of 

 violets/ This sweetening of the sound of &quot; Pontius 

 Pilate &quot; by a law of sound conformable with Grimm s, 

 was in sober fact the work of a village schoolgirl, but 

 Melford never hurried a word or allowed indistinctness 

 of belief or of expression to endanger the value of his 

 teaching or the safety of his future. I speak as one of his 

 pupils in the art of handwriting. Another of his pupils 

 won an entrance scholarship at a public school, and think 

 ing to please the old man the Rector, in telling the news, 

 added &quot; I dare say, Mr. Melford, he owes some of the 

 success to you/ But the labourer is worthy of his hire. 

 Such grudging recognition as this was but half his due 

 wages. &quot; All to me, all to me,&quot; said the stern voice ; and 

 indeed, to learn pothooks of him, to copy maxims under 

 his eye, was a liberal education. In the cleanliness that 

 is next to godliness he was no proficient. If the nib was 

 not to his liking and it was a daily grief and trouble to 

 him that so small a thing could spoil his smooth script 

 he would wipe it almost impatiently on the hank of 



