ent bent back,
and slowly chopping old grey jaws, and struck by a pathos in the sight,
exclaimed,--

"We've all been searched so, Mas' Gammon! I feel I know everything that's
in me. I'd say, I couldn't ha' given you dumplin's and tears; but think
of our wickedness, when I confess to you I did feel spiteful at you to
think that you were wiltin' to eat the dumplin's while all of us mourned
and rocked as in a quake, expecting the worst to befall; and that made me
refuse them to you. It was cruel of me, and well may you shake your head.
If I was only sure you said your prayers!"

The meaning in her aroused heart was, that if she could be sure Master
Gammon said his prayers, so as to be searched all through by them, as she
was herself, and to feel thereby, as she did, that he knew everything
that was within him, she would then, in admiration of his profound
equanimity, acknowledge him to be a superior Christian.

Naturally enough, Master Gammon allowed the interjection to pass,
regarding it as simply a vagrant action of the engine of speech; while
Mrs. Sumfit, with an interjector's consciousness of prodigious things
implied which were not in any degree comprehended, left his presence in
kindness, and with a shade less of the sense that he was a superior
Christian.

Nevertheless, the sight of Master Gammon was like a comforting medicine
to all who were in the house. He was Mrs. Sumfit's clock; he was balm and
blessedness in Rhoda's eyes; Anthony was jealous of him; the farmer held
to him as to a stake in the ground: even Robert, who rallied and
tormented, and was vexed by him, admitted that he stood some way between
an example and a warning, and was a study. The grand primaeval quality of
unchangeableness, as exhibited by this old man, affected them singularly
in their recovery from the storm and the wreck of the hours gone by; so
much so that they could not divest themselves of the idea that it was a
manifestation of power in Master Gammon to show forth undisturbed while
they were feeling their life shaken in them to the depths. I have never
had the opportunity of examining the idol-worshipping mind of a savage;
but it seems possible that the immutability of aspect of his little
wooden God may sometimes touch him with a similar astounded awe;--even
when, and indeed especially after, he has thrashed it. Had the old man
betrayed his mortality in a sign of curiosity to know why the hubbub of
trouble had arisen, and who was