r its brown rocks more loudly than he had ever heard it. Above the
bridge were swaying large quantities of floating timber, washed down by
the violence of the storm, and as he looked he saw three of these
derelicts ride to the brink, and tumble over, and among them a little
dog, that had got out there he could not tell how, which for a moment
stood on a rolling tree whining piteously, and then fell with it down
those ledges of furious frothing waters.

He ran close to the edge, and looked over, but there was no trace of
the animal for fully five minutes; then he saw its poor little body
emerge, battered, knocked about by stones and trees at the foot of the
great cascade, and at the sight his good sense and right feeling seemed
to return to him. He had temporarily, as he himself would have put it,
forgotten his Creator in the days of his youth; now all came back to
him; the duties of his position, its dignity and its obligations, and
he strove hard, by prayer and concentration of mind, to be as he had
been, and forget Miss Clairville and her tempestuous existence for a
while, as he took upon himself the work of the sacred day. He preached
later from the verse, "Yet in the Church I had rather speak five words
with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than
ten thousand words in an unknown tongue," and his voice and magnetic
delivery were not impaired. The little dog, the little dead dog,
figured in the sermon; like the Ancient Mariner when he leaned over the
rotting vessel's side and watched the beautiful living things moving in
the waters, his heart gushed out with sympathy as the image of the dog,
seeing his death, and recognizing no escape from it, remained with him.
The eyes of the poor animal seemed ever before him; large, pathetic
brown eyes, with soft patches of lighter brown fur above them, a
quivering nose and trembling paws--could he not have saved it? No--for
motion once given to those rolling logs, they would carry anything on
with them, and it was already too late when he first perceived it--a
small, shivering, unhappy little object--with fear shining in its large
eyes, those eyes he had seen looking directly at him as if to say:
"Help me, my brother, help me from this Death! Help me, for the love
of God, as you believe in God and in His Omnipotence and Goodness!"

CHAPTER XVIII

A CONCERT DE LUXE

"----Consumed
And vexed and chafed by levity and scorn,
And