thful did,--all honor be to the noble old
Patriarch for insisting on the worth of an honest man, and making the
best terms he could for a very ill-conditioned metropolis, which might
possibly, however, have contained ten righteous people, for whose sake it
should be spared!

The consequence of all this was, that he was in a singular and seemingly
self-contradictory state of mind when he took his hat and cane and went
forth to call on his heretical brother. The old minister took it for
granted that the Reverend Mr. Fairweather knew the private history of his
parishioner's family. He did not reflect that there are griefs men never
put into words,--that there are fears which must not be spoken,--intimate
matters of consciousness which must be carried, as bullets which have
been driven deep into the living tissues are sometimes carried, for a
whole lifetime,--encysted griefs, if we may borrow the chirurgeon's term,
never to be reached, never to be seen, never to be thrown out, but to go
into the dust with the frame that bore them about with it, during long
years of anguish, known only to the sufferer and his Maker. Dudley
Venner had talked with his minister about this child of his. But he had
talked cautiously, feeling his way for sympathy, looking out for those
indications of tact and judgment which would warrant him in some partial
communication, at least, of the origin of his doubts and fears, and never
finding them.

There was something about the Reverend Mr. Fairweather which repressed
all attempts at confidential intercourse. What this something was,
Dudley Venner could hardly say; but he felt it distinctly, and it sealed
his lips. He never got beyond certain generalities connected with
education and religious instruction. The minister could not help
discovering, however, that there were difficulties connected with this
girl's management, and he heard enough outside of the family to convince
him that she had manifested tendencies, from an early age, at variance
with the theoretical opinions he was in the habit of preaching, and in a
dim way of holding for truth, as to the natural dispositions of the human
being.

About this terrible fact of congenital obliquity his new beliefs began to
cluster as a centre, and to take form as a crystal around its nucleus.
Still, he might perhaps have struggled against them, had it not been for
the little Roman Catholic chapel he passed every Sunday, on his way to
the meeting