I had the
advantage of knowing a person who was branded before the whole
world, and punished by the law of his country, as a felonious
hypocrite. My Father himself could only sigh and admit the
charge. And yet--I doubt.

About half-way between our village and the town there lay a
comfortable villa inhabited by a retired solicitor, or perhaps
attorney, whom I shall name Mr. Dormant. We often called at his
half-way house, and, although he was a member of the town-
meeting, he not unfrequently came up to us for 'the breaking of
bread'. Mr. Dormant was a solid, pink man, of a cosy habit. He
had beautiful white hair, a very soft voice, and a welcoming,
wheedling manner; he was extremely fluent and zealous in using
the pious phraseology of the sect. My Father had never been very
much attracted to him, but the man professed, and I think felt,
an overwhelming admiration for my Father. Mr. Dormant was not
very well off, and in the previous year he had persuaded an aged
gentleman of wealth to come and board with him. When, in the
course of the winter, this gentleman died, much surprise was felt
at the report that he had left almost his entire fortune, which
was not inconsiderable, to Mr. Dormant.

Much surprise--for the old gentleman had a son to whom he had
always been warmly attached, who was far away, I think in South
America, practising a perfectly respectable profession of which
his father entirely approved. My own Father always preserved a
delicacy and a sense of honour about money which could not have
been more sensitive if he had been an ungodly man, and I am very
much pleased to remember that when the legacy was first spoken
of, he regretted that Mr. Dormant should have allowed the old
gentleman to make this will. If he knew the intention, my Father
said, it would have shown a more proper sense of his
responsibility if he had dissuaded the testator from so
unbecoming a disposition. That was long before any legal question
arose; and now Mr. Dormant came into his fortune, and began to
make handsome gifts to missionary societies, and to his own
meeting in the town. If I do not mistake, he gave, unsolicited, a
sum to our building fund, which my Father afterwards returned.
But in process of time we heard that the son had come back from
the Antipodes, and was making investigations. Before we knew
where we were, the news burst upon us, like a bomb-shell, that
Mr. Dormant had been arrested on a criminal charge and was now