ic paroxysm, and
the next day was Sunday, and his morning's discourse was unwritten. His
savage mediaeval theology came to his relief, and he clutched out of a
heap of yellow manuscripts his well-worn "convulsion-fit" sermon. He
preached it the next day as if it did his heart good, but Myrtle Hazard
did not hear it, for she had gone to St. Bartholomew's with Olive
Eveleth.

CHAPTER XVII.

SAINT AND SINNER

It happened a little after this time that the minister's invalid wife
improved--somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was
beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the physician
advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of her life by
going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful companionship.
She was therefore frequently at the house of Olive Eveleth; and as Myrtle
wanted to see young people, and had her own way now as never before, the
three girls often met at the parsonage. Thus they became more and more
intimate, and grew more and more into each other's affections.

These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to be
found in all our towns and villages. Olive had been carefully trained,
and at the proper age confirmed. Bathsheba had been prayed for, and in
due time startled and converted. Myrtle was a simple daughter of Eve,
with many impulses like those of the other two girls, and some that
required more watching. She was not so safe, perhaps, as either of the
other girls, for this world or the next; but she was on some accounts
more interesting, as being a more genuine representative of that
inexperienced and too easily deluded, yet always cherished, mother of our
race, whom we must after all accept as embodying the creative idea of
woman, and who might have been alive and happy now (though at a great
age) but for a single fatal error.

The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's father,
was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a cultivated man,
with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader, a neat writer, a
safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental pasturage, which his
sermons kept cropped moderately close without any exhausting demand upon
the soil. Olive had grown insensibly into her religious maturity, as
into her bodily and intellectual developments, which one might suppose
was the natural order of things in a well-regulated Christian--household,
where the children are