, and who had just been thrusting two respectable
strangers, taken from the hands of a mob, covered with stripes and
stripped of clothing, into the inner prison, and making their feet fast
in the stocks. His thought, in the moment of terror, is for himself:
first, suicide; then, what he shall do,--not to save his household,--not
to fulfil his duty to his office,--not to repair the outrage he has been
committing,--but to secure his own personal safety. Truly, character
shows itself as much in a man's way of becoming a Christian as in any
other!

--Elsie sat, statue-like, through the sermon. It would not be fair to
the reader to give an abstract of that. When a man who has been bred to
free thought and free speech suddenly finds himself stepping about, like
a dancer amidst his eggs, among the old addled majority-votes which he
must not tread upon, he is a spectacle for men and angels. Submission to
intellectual precedent and authority does very well for those who have
been bred to it; we know that the underground courses of their minds
are laid in the Roman cement of tradition, and that stately and splendid
structures may be reared on such a foundation. But to see one laying a
platform over heretical quicksands, thirty or forty or fifty years deep,
and then beginning to build upon it, is a sorry sight. A new convert
from the reformed to the ancient faith may be very strong in the arms,
but he will always have weak legs and shaky knees. He may use his hands
well, and hit hard with his fists, but he will never stand on his legs
in the way the man does who inherits his belief.

The services were over at last, and Dudley Venner and his daughter
walked home together in silence. He always respected her moods, and saw
clearly enough that some inward trouble was weighing upon her. There
was nothing to be said in such cases, for Elsie could never talk of her
griefs. An hour, or a day, or a week of brooding, with perhaps a sudden
flash of violence: this was the way in which the impressions which make
other women weep, and tell their griefs by word or letter, showed their
effects in her mind and acts.

She wandered off up into the remoter parts of The Mountain, that day,
after their return. No one saw just where she went,--indeed, no one knew
its forest-recesses and rocky fastnesses as she did. She was gone until
late at night; and when Old Sophy, who had watched for her, bound up her
long hair for her sleep, it was damp with the