ynthia
Badlam, and repeated her close inspection of every outline and every
light and shadow in her figure. She did not announce any opinion as
to the age or good looks or general aspect or special points of Miss
Cynthia; but she made a sound which the books write humph! but which
real folks make with closed lips, thus: m'!--a sort of half-suppressed
labio-palato-nasal utterance, implying that there is a good deal which
might be said, and all the vocal organs want to have a chance at it, if
there is to be any talking.

Friends and neighbors were coming in and out; and the next person that
came was the old minister, of whom, and of his colleague, the Rev.
Joseph Bellamy Stoker, some account may here be introduced.

The Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton Father Pemberton as brother ministers
called him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country
people--would have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the
village had not been so much older. A man over ninety is a great comfort
to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme
outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy
must get by him before he can come near their camp. Dr. Hurlbut, at
ninety-two, made Priest Pemberton seem comparatively little advanced;
but the college catalogue showed that he must be seventy-five years old,
if, as we may suppose, he was twenty at the time of his graduation.

He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of
his flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging his
serene and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the measured
dignity of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff, he was an
imposing personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the occasion
demanded it. His creed was of the sternest: he was looked up to as a
bulwark against all the laxities which threatened New England theology.
But it was a creed rather of the study and of the pulpit than of
every-day application among his neighbors. He dealt too much in the
lofty abstractions which had always such fascinations for the higher
class of New England divines, to busy himself as much as he might have
done with the spiritual condition of individuals. He had also a good
deal in him of what he used to call the Old Man, which, as he confessed,
he had never succeeded in putting off,--meaning thereby certain
qualities belonging to humanity, as much as the natural gifts of the
dum