been strong:  he had inherited his mother’s delicacy of constitution, and her nervous excitability as well; but he had rare qualities of mind, and gave great promise as a scholar.  The news of his death was a blow to every heart that loved his father.  “This will kill the Parson,” was said by sorrowing voices far and near.  On the contrary, it seemed to be the very thing which cleared the atmosphere of his whole life, and renewed his vigor and energy.  He rose up from the terrible grief more majestic than ever, as some grand old tree, whose young shoots and branches have been torn away by fierce storms, seems to lift its head higher than before, and to tower in its stripped loneliness above all its fellows.  All the loving fatherhood of his nature was spent now on the young people of his town; and, by young people, I mean all between the ages of four and twenty.  There was hardly a baby that did not know Parson Dorrance, and stretch out its arms to him; there was hardly a young man or a young woman who did not go to him with troubles or perplexities.  You met him, one day, drawing a huge sledful of children on the snow; another day, walking in the centre of a group of young men and maidens, teaching them as he walked.  They all loved him as a comrade, and reverenced him as a teacher.  They wanted him at their picnics; and, whenever he preached, they flocked to hear him.  It was a significant thing that his title of Professor was never heard.  From first to last, he was always called “Parson Dorrance;” and there were few Sundays on which he did not preach at home or abroad.  It was one of the forms of his active benevolence.  If a poor minister broke down and needed rest, Parson Dorrance preached for him, for one month or for three, as the case required.  If a little church were without a pastor and could not find one, or were in debt and could not afford to hire one, it sent to ask Parson Dorrance to supply the pulpit; and he always went.  Finally, not content with these ordinary and established channels for preaching the gospel, he sought out for himself a new one.  About eight miles from the village there was a negro settlement known as “The Cedars.”  It was a wild place.  Great outcropping ledges of granite, with big boulders toppling over, and piled upon each other, and all knotted together by the gnarled roots of ancient cedar-trees, made the place seem like ruins of old fortresses.  There were caves of great depth, some of them with two entrances, in which, in the time of the fugitive slave law, many a poor hunted creature had had safe refuge.  Besides the cedar-trees, there were sugar-maples and white birches; and the beautiful rock ferns grew all over the ledges in high waving tufts, almost as luxuriantly as if they were in the tropics; so that the spot, wild and fierce as it was, had great beauty.  Many of the fugitive slaves had built themselves huts here:  some lived in the caves.  A few poor and vicious whites had joined them, intermarried with them, and from these