full sail for
Baltimore.

CHAPTER XXXV.

MARIAN.

Great was the consternation caused by the arrest of a gentleman so high
in social rank and scholastic and theological reputation as the Rev.
Thurston Willcoxen, and upon a charge, too, so awful as that for which
he stood committed! It was the one all-absorbing subject of thought and
conversation. People neglected their business, forgetting to work, to
bargain, buy or sell. Village shopkeepers, instead of vamping their
wares, leaned eagerly over their counters, and with great dilated eyes
and dogmatical forefingers, discussed with customers the merits or
demerits of the great case. Village mechanics, occupied solely with the
subject of the pastor's guilt or innocence, disappointed with impunity
customers who were themselves too deeply interested and too highly
excited by the same subject, to remember, far less to rebuke them, for
unfulfilled engagements. Even women totally neglected, or badly
fulfilled, their domestic avocations; for who in the parish could sit
down quietly to the construction of a garment or a pudding while their
beloved pastor, the "all praised" Thurston Willcoxen, lay in prison
awaiting his trial for a capital crime?

As usual in such cases, there was very little cool reasoning, and very
much passionate declamation. The first astonishment had given place to
conjecture, which yielded in turn to dogmatic judgments--acquiescing or
condemning, as the self-constituted judges happened to be favorable or
adverse to the cause of the minister.

When the first Sabbath after the arrest came, and the church was closed
because the pulpit was unoccupied, the dispersed congregation, haunted
by the vision of the absent pastor in his cell, discussed the matter
anew, and differed and disputed, and fell out worse than ever. Parties
formed for and against the minister, and party feuds raged high.

Upon the second Sabbath--being the day before the county court should
sit--a substitute filled the pulpit of Mr. Willcoxen, and his
congregation reassembled to hear an edifying discourse from the text: "I
myself have seen the ungodly in great power, and flourishing like a
green bay-tree. I went by, and lo! he was gone; I sought him, but his
place was nowhere to be found."

This sermon bore rather hard (by pointed allusions) upon the great
elevation and sudden downfall of the celebrated minister, and, in
consequence, delighted one portion of the audience and enra