he
Doctor's coat and seeing him seated in an armchair by the open window,
took out a long stocking of blue-mixed yarn which she was knitting for
his winter wear, and, pinning her knitting-sheath on her side, was soon
trotting her needles contentedly in front of him.

The ill-success of the Doctor's morning attempt at enforcing his
theology in practice rather depressed his spirits. There was a noble
innocence of nature in him which looked at hypocrisy with a puzzled and
incredulous astonishment. How a man _could_ do so and be so was to him
a problem at which his thoughts vainly labored. Not that he was in the
least discouraged or hesitating in regard to his own course. When he
had made up his mind to perform a duty, the question of success no more
entered his thoughts than those of the granite boulder to which we have
before compared him. When the time came for him to roll, he did roll
with the whole force of his being;--where he was to land was not his
concern.

Mildly and placidly he sat with his hands resting on his knees, while
Mr. Zebedee and Mrs. Scudder compared notes respecting the relative
prospects of corn, flax, and buckwheat, and thence passed to the doings
of Congress and the last proclamation of General Washington, pausing
once in a while, if, peradventure, the Doctor might take up the
conversation. Still he sat dreamily eyeing the flies as they fizzed down
the panes of the half-open window.

"I think," said Mr. Zebedee, "the prospects of the Federal party were
never brighter."

The Doctor was a stanch Federalist, and generally warmed to this
allurement; but it did not serve this time.

Suddenly drawing himself up, a light came into his blue eyes, and he
said to Mr. Marvyn,--

"I'm thinking, Deacon, if it is wrong to keep back the wages of a
servant till after the going down of the sun, what those are to do who
keep them back all their lives."

There was a way the Doctor had of hearing and seeing when he looked
as if his soul were afar off, and bringing suddenly into present
conversation some fragment of the past on which he had been leisurely
hammering in the quiet chambers of his brain, which was sometimes quite
startling.

This allusion to a passage of Scripture which Mr. Marvyn was reading
when he came in, and which nobody supposed he had attended to, startled
Mrs. Scudder, who thought, mentally, "Now for it!" and laid down her
knitting-work, and eyed her cousin anxiously. Mrs. Marvyn and Mar