"We must pronounce this Carlingford series the best contributions to fiction of recent years,-lively, pregnant, and rich in both imagination, feeling, and eloquence. They will irresistibly carry to the end every reader who ventures upon them. Spectator. ・ This story ( Salem Chapel'), so fresh, so powerfully written, and so tragic, stands out from among its fellows like a piece of newly-coined gold in a handful of dim common-place shillings. Tales of pastoral experience and scenes from clerical life we have had in plenty; but the sacred things of the conventicle, the relative position of pastor and flock in a Nonconforming 'connection,' were but guessed at by the world outside, and terrible is the revelation."— Westminster Review. Chronicles of Carlingford. MISS MARJORIBANKS. CHAPTER I. MISS MARJORIBANKS lost her mother when she was only fifteen, and when, to add to the misfortune, she was absent at school, and could not have it in her power to soothe her dear mamma's last moments, as she herself said. Words are sometimes very poor exponents of such an event: but it happens now and then, on the other hand, that a plain intimation expresses too much, and suggests emotion and suffering which, in reality, have but little, if any, existence. Mrs Marjoribanks, poor lady, had been an invalid for many years; she had grown a little peevish in her loneliness, not feeling herself of much account in this world. There are some rare natures that are VOL. I. A |