A New Aristocracy

								

Mr. Murchison had been the rector of the small parish of Barnley,
distant perhaps a hundred miles from the city of C——, the great
commercial center of the West, and having attended faithfully to his
duties for a series of years, had been stricken at last with the dread
pangs of consumption. Two years of painful waiting had passed away, and
now the release had come. Devout, patient, and faithful, who could doubt
that it was well with him?
“God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” tremblingly spoke the
clergyman who had been summoned to conduct the burial service. “Surely
He will so influence the hearts of His people that these bereft ones,
these fatherless and motherless children, shall not suffer from contact
with the cold and bitter side of life.”
Comforting words truly; words that fell, as rain falls on parched
fields, upon the benumbed senses of those who wept for their dead; words
that touched the hearts of the little band of parishioners, and made
each one wonder for the time being what he could do for them; words that
resulted in offerings of flowers and fruit for one week and—so soon do
good impulses die—in comment and unsought advice for another.
It was a well-known fact that aside from his library and household
belongings Mr. Murchison had left nothing. A student and a biblist of
rare discernment, he was happiest when deep in abstruse research, and
many a dollar of his meagre salary had gone for volumes whose undoubted
antiquity might help him to the completion of some vexed problem.
Sometimes, looking up from his treatise or his sermon, he would glance
at Margaret, his eldest daughter and careful housekeeper for the last
five lonely years of his life, and think painfully of the time, the
dread sometime, that was sure to leave his darlings unprotected. He
wished, good man, that he might have money; not that he coveted the
dross of earth, but that it might be the Lord’s will to shield his loved
ones from contact with bleak and bitter poverty. Many a prayer was
rounded with that earnest supplication, to which he supplemented, always
in complete resignation, “Thy will, not mine, be done.” But he never saw
the earthly realization of his hopes. He always grew poorer; his
clothing just a trifle shabbier, the table a little plainer, and
Margaret daily more and more put to her wit’s ends in the difficult
problem of making something out of nothing. But who shall say the faith
of a life-time met with no recompense? Who can declare, with certainty,
the blinded eyes saw not afterward with clearer vision that he had left
each of his darlings God’s highest riches, a brave human intelligence?
Margaret Murchison, the eldest of the three children, was too strongly
built, physically and mentally, to be beautiful. It is indisputably true
that where nature puts strength she also puts hard lines, and every
feature of Margaret’s face bespoke the positive nature; quick to