“The day is warm,” said Miss Caroline, receiving one of the glasses from her servant, and with a bright look at her guest.

“It is intensely warm, and quite unusually so for this time of year,” said the minister, absently taking the other glass now proffered him.

“We shall combat it,” said Miss Caroline with some vivacity.  She delicately applied her lips to the straw, and a slight depression appeared in each of her acceptable cheeks.

“A cooling beverage at this hour is most grateful,” said the minister, rejoicing in the icy feel of the glass, and falling hopefully to his own straw.

“Clem makes them perfectly,” said Miss Caroline.

“What do you call them?” asked the minister.  He had relinquished his straw, and his kind face shone with a pleased surprise.

“Why, mint juleps,” replied Miss Caroline, glancing quickly up.

“Ah, mint! that explains it,” said the minister with satisfaction, his broad face clearing of a slight bewilderment.

“Clem found a beautiful patch of it by a spring half a mile up the river,” volunteered Miss Caroline, between dainty pulls at her straw.

“It is a lovely plant—­a lovely plant, indeed!” rejoined the minister, for a moment setting down his glass to wipe his brow.  “I remember now detecting the same fragrance when I watered my horse at that spring.  But I did not dream that it—­I wonder—­” he broke off, taking up his glass—­“that its virtues are not more widely apprehended.  I have never heard that an acceptable beverage might be made from it.”

“Not every one can make a mint julep as Clem can,” said his hostess.

A moist and futile splutter from the bottom of the minister’s glass was his only reply.

He set the glass back on the table with a pleasant speculation showing in his eyes.  The talk became again animated.  Chiefly the minister talked, and his hostess found him most companionable.

“Let me offer you another julep,” she said, after a little, noting that his eyes had swept the empty glass with a chastened blankness.  The minister let her.

“If it would not be troubling you—­really?  The heat is excessive, and I find that the mint, simple herb though it be, is strangely salutary.”

The minister was a man of years and weight and worth.  He possessed a reliant simplicity that put him at once close to those he met.  Of these, by his manner, he asked all:  confidence without reserve, troubles, doubts, distresses, material or otherwise.  And this manner of his prevailed.  The hearts of his people opened to him as freely as his own opened to receive them.  He was a good man and, partly by reason of this ingenuous, unsuspicious mind, an invaluable instrument of grace.

When he had talked to Miss Caroline through the second julep,—­digressing only to marvel briefly again that the properties of mint should so long have been Nature’s own secret in Little Arcady,—­telling her his joys, his griefs, his interests, which were but the joys and griefs and interests of his people, he wrought a spell upon her so that she in turn became confiding.