led the young man to select one of Lyman Abbott's shortest
and simplest sermons,--itself a type of the mercy which it
commended,--and frankly read it to us instead of pronouncing a
discourse of his own. The result of this was that we came out of chapel
at a quarter past eleven in a truly grateful and religious frame of
mind.

But our comrades were still detained in the yellow meeting-house; and
while the stage-coach waited for them in the glaring fervour of noon,
my Uncle Peter and I climbed down from our seats and took refuge on the
grass, in the shadow of the roundhead maples that stood guard along the
north wall of the Puritan sanctuary. The windows were open. We could
see the rhythmic motion of the fan-drill in the pews. The pulpit was
not visible; but from that unseen eminence a strident, persistent voice
flowed steadily, expounding the necessity and uses of "a baptism of
fire," with a monotonous variety of application. Fire was needful for
the young, for the middle-aged, for the old, and for those, if any, who
occupied the intermediate positions. It was needful for the rich and
for the poor, for the ignorant and for the learned, for church-members,
for those who were "well-wishers" but not "professors," and for
hardened sinners,--for everybody in fact: and if any class or condition
of human creatures were omitted in the exhaustive analysis, the
preacher led us to apprehend that he was only holding them in reserve,
and that presently he would include them in the warm and triumphant
application of his subject. He was one of those preachers who say it
all, and make no demands upon the intelligence of their hearers.

Meantime the brown-and-yellow grasshoppers crackled over the parched
fields, and the locusts rasped their one-stringed fiddles in the trees,
and the shrunken little river complained faintly in its bed, and all
nature was sighing, not for fire, but for water and cool shade. But
still the ardent voice continued its fuliginous exhortations, until the
very fans grew limp, and the flowers in the hats of the village girls
seemed to wilt with fervent heat.

My Uncle Peter and I were brought up in that old-fashioned school of
manners which discouraged the audible criticism of religious exercises.
But we could not help thinking.

"He has just passed 'Secondly,'" said I, "and that leaves two more main
heads, and a practical conclusion of either three or five points."

My Uncle Peter said nothing in answer to