various directions over the
encircling vale, and commanding charming views of the rolling ridges
which lay beyond, were the houses of the little summer colony of
artists, doctors, lawyers and merchants. Two or three were flamboyant,
but for the most part they blended rather gently with the landscape,
and were of a modesty which gave their owners just ground for pride.

The countenance of the place was placid. It breathed an air of repose
and satisfaction, a spirit which when it refers to outward
circumstances is called contentment, and when it refers to oneself is
called complacency. The Samaritans, in fact, did not think ill of
themselves, and of their village they thought exceeding well. There was
nothing in its situation, its looks, its customs which they would have
wished to alter; and when a slight change came, a new house, a pathway
on the other side of the green, an iron fence around the graveyard, a
golf-links in addition to the tennis-courts, a bridge-whist afternoon
to supplement the croquet club, by an unconscious convention its
novelty was swiftly eliminated and in a short time it became one of the
"old traditions." Decidedly a place of peace was Samaria in
Connecticut,--a place in which "the struggle for life" and the
rivalries and contests of the great outside world were known only by
report. Yet, being human, it had its own inward strifes; and of one of
these I wish to tell the tale.

In the end this internal conflict centred about Leviathan; but in the
beginning I believe that it was of an ecclesiastical nature. At all
events it did not run its course without a manifest admixture of the
_odium theologicum_, and it came near to imperilling the cause of
Christian unity in Samaria.

The Episcopal Church was really one of the more recent old institutions
of the village. It stood beside the graveyard, just around the corner
from the village green; and the type of its wooden architecture, which
was profoundly early Gothic and was painted of a burnt-umber hue
sprinkled with sand to imitate brownstone, indicated that it must have
been built in the Upjohn Period, about the middle of the nineteenth
century. But Samaria, without the slightest disloyalty to the
principles of the Puritans, had promptly adopted and assimilated the
Episcopal form of worship. The singing by a voluntary quartette of
mixed voices, the hours of service, even the sermons, were all of the
Samaritan type. The old rector, Dr. Snodgrass, a