began to "hurry up."

"You're coming, aren't you?" said I, checked at the churchyard gate by
an instinct of some hesitation on Isaac's part.

"Well, I suppose I am, sir," said the bee-master, and in he came.

The thick walls, the stained windows, and the stone floor, which was
below the level of the churchyard, made the church very cool. Master
Isaac and I seated ourselves so that we had a good view within, and
could also catch a peep through the open porch of the sunlit country
outside. Charlie's father was in his place when we got in; his
threadbare coat was covered by the white linen of his office, and I do
not think it would have been possible even to my levity to have felt
anything but a respectful awe of him in church.

The cares of this life are not as a rule improving to the countenance.
No one who watches faces can have failed to observe that more beauty is
marred and youth curtailed by vulgar worry than by almost any other
disfigurement. In the less educated classes, where self-control is not
very habitual, and where interests beyond petty and personal ones are
rare, the soft brows and tender lips of girlhood are too often puckered
and hardened by mean anxieties, even where these do not affect the girls
personally, but only imitatively, and as the daily interests of their
station in life. In such cases the discontented, careworn look is by no
means a certain indication of corresponding suffering, but there are too
many others in which tempers that should have been generous, and faces
that should have been noble, and aims that should have been high, are
blurred and blunted by the real weight of real everyday care.