Scenes of Clerical Life

The first of the three stories, ''The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,'' is the slightest and simplest. Mr. Barton, a curate, with an income of eighty pounds a-year, with an angelic but sickly wife and a host of hungry little children, allows himself to be duped by the title of a ''Countess Czerlaski,'' the handsome English widow of a Polish dancing-master. The countess quarrels with her ...