aths
almost crossed in the year 1817, when the two men of identical name,
title, and profession were within forty-five miles of each other, one
being resident as pastor of the Stow's Square church, three miles north
of Lowville in Lewis county, while the Otsego missionary was holding
services at Verona in Oneida county. At different times they traversed
the same counties: it was in 1816 that the Otsego missionary made tours
in Jefferson and St. Lawrence counties; the other Father Nash is known
to have visited these counties eight years later.[86]

The series of coincidences is made more singular by the fact that each
Father Nash had married a wife whose first name was Olive, so that not
only were both men called Father Nash, but the wife, after the custom of
that day, in each case was addressed as Mrs. Olive Nash.

Aside from these remarkable identities the two men were quite
dissimilar. Both were natives of Massachusetts, but the Otsego Nash came
from the extreme west of that State, the other from the farthest east.
Both originally belonged to the Congregational denomination, but the
Otsego Nash had become a priest of the Episcopal Church, while the other
was a Presbyterian minister. The Presbyterian Nash was a famous
revivalist. The Otsego missionary detested revivals. He said that the
converts "reminded him of little humble-bees, which are rather larger
when hatched than they are sometimes afterwards."

There is something almost mysterious in the figure of this second Father
Nash rising from the mist of bygone years, and one is quite prepared to
read of him[87] that he went forth to labor for souls with a double
black veil before his face, like the minister in Hawthorne's weird tale
whose congregation was terrified by the "double fold of crape, hanging
down from his forehead to his mouth, and slightly stirring with his
breath." Three miles north of Lowville in Lewis county, in Stow's Square
churchyard, a marble shaft eight feet high, conspicuous from almost any
point in the country which stretches away to the Adirondack wilderness,
commemorates, in connection with the church that he erected there, the
Father Nash who labored in Lewis and Jefferson counties, and in an
obscure cemetery, not far distant, a modest headstone marks his grave.

Returning to the story of Cooperstown's Father Nash, no estimate of his
work can fail to take into account the character of the field in which
he labored. When he came to this reg