gracefully.
He reviewed the career of Samuel, who lived and died some thousands of
years ago. The miraculous touch of Carlyle or Macaulay might easily
have failed in the task of reviving a man so thoroughly dead. But the
Reverend Robert entered this unequal contest with no evidence of
alarm. The dead man prevailed. The power of his long sleep fell upon
us. My head grew heavy. I felt my weight bearing down upon the
cushions. A stiffness came into my bones.

"On our way to church Betsey had placed the young minister in my
thoughts. The trustees had reckoned that he would revive the interest
of the young people in Sunday worship; and he did, but it was the
worship of youth and beauty.

"Well, the other churches were emptier than ever, and so the spiritual
life of the community was in no way improved. In fact, I guess it had
been a little embittered by the new conditions. As soon as it became
known that Marie had won the prize of his favor the other girls had
returned to their native altars, having discovered that the new
minister was vain, worldly, and conceited.

"Lettie Davis, who had made a dead set at him, had been strongly
convinced of that as soon as he began to show a preference for Marie,
and the Davis family had left the church and gone over to the
Methodists. The young man had been filled with alarm. He feared it
would wreck the church. That old ship of the faith was leaky and
iron-sick, and down by the head and heel, as they say at sea. She
rolled if one got off or on her.

"Such was the condition of things when we entered the church of my
fathers. We sat down in the Potter pew a few minutes before the
service began. There were, by actual count, forty-nine people gathered
around the altar of the old church, and behind us a great emptiness
and the ghosts of the dead. In my boyhood I had sat in its dim light,
with six hundred people filling every seat to the doors and a man of
power and learning in the pulpit.

"Faces long forgotten were there in those pews--old faces, young
faces. How many thousands had left its altar to find distant homes or
to go on their last journey to that nearer one in the churchyard! My
heart was full and ready for strong meat, but none came to me. The
moment of silence had been something rare--like an old Grecian vase
wonderfully wrought. Then, suddenly, the singing fell upon us and
broke the silence into ruins. It was in the nature of a breach of the
peace. There are two kinds of