to indulge. God
help him, over whose dead soul in his living body must be uttered the sad
supplication, Requiescat in pace!

A knock at the Reverend Mr. Fairweather's study door called his eyes from
the book on which they were intent. He looked up, as if expecting a
welcome guest.

The Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D. D., entered the study of the
Reverend Chauncy Fairweather. He was not the expected guest. Mr.
Fairweather slipped the book he was reading into a half-open drawer, and
pushed in the drawer. He slid something which rattled under a paper
lying on the table. He rose with a slight change of color, and welcomed,
a little awkwardly, his unusual visitor.

"Good-evening, Brother Fairweather!" said the Reverend Doctor, in a very
cordial, good-humored way. "I hope I am not spoiling one of those
eloquent sermons I never have a chance to hear."

"Not at all, not at all," the younger clergyman answered, in a languid
tone, with a kind of habitual half-querulousness which belonged to
it,--the vocal expression which we meet with now and then, and which says
as plainly as so many words could say it, "I am a suffering individual.
I am persistently undervalued, wronged, and imposed upon by mankind and
the powers of the universe generally. But I endure all. I endure you.
Speak. I listen. It is a burden to me, but I even approve. I sacrifice
myself. Behold this movement of my lips! It is a smile."

The Reverend Doctor knew this forlorn way of Mr. Fairweather's, and was
not troubled by it. He proceeded to relate the circumstances of his
visit from the old black woman, and the fear she was in about the young
girl, who being a parishioner of Mr. Fairweather's, he had thought it
best to come over and speak to him about old Sophy's fears and fancies.

In telling the old woman's story, he alluded only vaguely to those
peculiar circumstances to which she had attributed so much importance,
taking it for granted that the other minister must be familiar with the
whole series of incidents she had related. The old minister was
mistaken, as we have before seen. Mr. Fairweather had been settled in
the place only about ten years, and, if he had heard a strange hint now
and then about Elsie, had never considered it as anything more than idle
and ignorant, if not malicious, village-gossip. All that he fully
understood was that this had been a perverse and unmanageable child, and
that the extraordinary care which had been