pass on Sundays. He could never look on
the thronging multitudes that crowded its pews and aisles or knelt
bare-headed on its steps, without a longing to get in among them and
go down on his knees and enjoy that luxury of devotional contact which
makes a worshipping throng as different from the same numbers praying
apart as a bed of coals is from a trail of scattered cinders.

"Oh, if I could but huddle in with those poor laborers and
working-women!" he would say to himself. "If I could but breathe that
atmosphere, stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient litanies,
and cloudy with the smoke of hallowed incense, for one hour, instead of
droning over these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!" The
intellectual isolation of his sect preyed upon him; for, of all
terrible things to natures like his, the most terrible is to belong to a
minority. No person that looked at his thin and sallow cheek, his sunken
and sad eye, his tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who heard
his querulous, though not unmusical voice, could fail to see that his
life was an uneasy one, that he was engaged in some inward conflict. His
dark, melancholic aspect contrasted with his seemingly cheerful creed,
and was all the more striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing a
belief which made him a passenger on board a shipwrecked planet, was
yet a most good-humored and companionable gentleman, whose laugh on
week-days did one as much good to listen to as the best sermon he ever
delivered on a Sunday.

A mile or two from the centre of Rockland was a pretty little Episcopal
church, with a roof like a wedge of cheese, a square tower, a stained
window, and a trained rector, who read the service with such ventral
depth of utterance and rrreduplication of the rrresonant letter, that
his own mother would not have known him for her son, if the good woman
had not ironed his surplice and put it on with her own hands.

There were two public-houses in the place: one dignified with the name
of the Mountain House, somewhat frequented by city people in the summer
months, large-fronted, three-storied, balconied, boasting a distinct
ladies'-drawing-room, and spreading a table d'hote of some pretensions;
the other, "Pollard's Tahvern," in the common speech,--a two-story
building, with a bar-room, once famous, where there was a great smell of
hay and boots and pipes and all other bucolic-flavored elements,--where
games of checkers were pla