e could hardly expect to find any reference to the early
fathers or federal head-ship in Adam on the cupboard door. I thought of
the stories I had heard of the old minister and felt very well
acquainted with him, though his books had been taken down and his fire
was out, and he himself had gone away. I was glad to think what a good,
faithful man he was, who spoke comfortable words to his people and lived
pleasantly with them in this quiet country place so many years. There
are old people living who have told me that nobody preaches nowadays as
he used to preach, and that he used to lift his hat to everybody; that
he liked a good dinner, and always was kind to the poor.

I thought as I stood in the study, how many times he must have looked
out of the small-paned western windows across the fields, and how in his
later days he must have had a treasure of memories of the people who had
gone out of that room the better for his advice and consolation, the
people whom he had helped and taught and ruled. I could not imagine
that he ever angrily took his parishioners to task for their errors of
doctrine; indeed, it was not of his active youth and middle age that I
thought at all, but of the last of his life, when he sat here in the
sunshine of a winter afternoon, and the fire flickered and snapped on
the hearth, and he sat before it in his arm-chair with a brown old book
which he laid on his knee while he thought and dozed, and roused himself
presently to greet somebody who came in, a little awed at first, to talk
with him. It was a great thing to be a country minister in those old
days, and to be such a minister as he was; truly the priest and ruler of
his people. The times have changed, and the temporal power certainly is
taken away. The divine right of ministers is almost as little believed
in as that of kings, by many people; it is not possible for the
influence to be so great, the office and the man are both looked at with
less reverence. It is a pity that it should be so, but the conservative
people who like old-fashioned ways cannot tell where to place all the
blame. And it is very odd to think that these iconoclastic and
unpleasant new times of ours will, a little later, be called old times,
and that the children, when they are elderly people, will sigh to have
them back again.

I was very glad to see the old house, and I told myself a great many
stories there, as one cannot help doing in such a place. There must have
b