e leisure, and could think undisturbed to his
heart's content. There were nearly two hours of unbroken quiet before
him; and the mere fact of his having stepped aside from the routine of
his duty to procure it; marked it in his thoughts as a special occasion,
which ought in the nature of things to yield more than the ordinary
harvest of mental profit.

Theron's musings were broken in upon from time to time by rumbling
outbursts of hymn-singing from the church next door. Surely, he said to
himself, there could be no other congregation in the Conference, or in
all Methodism, which sang so badly as these Octavians did. The noise,
as it came to him now and again, divided itself familiarly into a main
strain of hard, high, sharp, and tinny female voices, with three or four
concurrent and clashing branch strains of part-singing by men who did
not know how. How well he already knew these voices! Through two wooden
walls he could detect the conceited and pushing note of Brother Lovejoy,
who tried always to drown the rest out, and the lifeless, unmeasured
weight of shrill clamor which Sister Barnum hurled into every chorus,
half closing her eyes and sticking out her chin as she did so. They
drawled their hymns too, these people, till Theron thought he understood
that injunction in the Discipline against singing too slowly. It had
puzzled him heretofore; now he felt that it must have been meant in
prophecy for Octavius.

It was impossible not to recall in contrast that other church music
he had heard, a month before, and the whole atmosphere of that other
pastoral sitting room, from which he had listened to it. The startled
and crowded impressions of that strange evening had been lying hidden
in his mind all this while, driven into a corner by the pressure of more
ordinary, everyday matters. They came forth now, and passed across
his brain--no longer confusing and distorted, but in orderly and
intelligible sequence. Their earlier effect had been one of frightened
fascination. Now he looked them over calmly as they lifted themselves,
one by one, and found himself not shrinking at all, or evading anything,
but dwelling upon each in turn as a natural and welcome part of the most
important experience of his life.

The young minister had arrived, all at once, at this conclusion. He did
not question at all the means by which he had reached it. Nothing was
clearer to his mind than the conclusion itself--that his meeting, with
the pri