not to feel at ease in his presence.  It was impossible not to tell him all that he asked.  Before you knew it, you were speaking to him of your own feelings, tastes, the incidents of your life, your plans and purposes, as if he were a species of father confessor.  He questioned you so gently, yet with such an air of right; he listened so observantly and sympathetically.  He did not treat Mercy Philbrick as a stranger; for Mrs. Hunter had told him already all she knew of her friend’s life, and had showed him several of Mercy’s poems, which had surprised him much by their beauty, and still more by their condensation of thought.  They seemed to him almost more masculine than feminine; and he had unconsciously anticipated that in seeing Mercy he would see a woman of masculine type.  He was greatly astonished.  He could not associate this slight, fair girl, with a child’s honesty and appeal in her eyes, with the forceful words he had read from her pen.  He pursued his conversation with her eagerly, seeking to discover the secret of her style, to trace back the poetry from its flower to its root.  It was an astonishment to Mercy to find herself talking about her own verses with this stranger whom she so reverenced.  But she felt at once as if she had sat at his feet all her life, and had no right to withhold any thing from her master.

“I suppose, Mrs. Philbrick, you have read the earlier English poets a great deal, have you not?” he said.  “I infer so from the style of some of your poems.”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Mercy, in honest vehemence.  “I have read hardly any thing, Mr. Dorrance.  I know Herbert a little; but most of the old English poets I have never even seen.  I have never lived where there were any books till now.”

“You love Wordsworth, I hope,” he said inquiringly.

Mercy turned very red, and answered in a tone of desperation, “I’ve tried to.  Mr. Allen said I must.  But I can’t.  I don’t care any thing about him.”  And she looked at the Parson with the air of a culprit who has confessed a terrible misdemeanor.

“Ah,” he replied, “you have not then reached the point in the journey at which one sees him.  It is only a question of time:  one comes of a sudden into the presence of Wordsworth, as a traveller finds some day, upon a well-known road, a grand cathedral, into which he turns aside and worships, and wonders how it happens that he never before saw it.  You will tell me some day that this has happened to you.  It is only a question of time.”

Just as Parson Dorrance pronounced the last words, they were echoed by a laughing party who had come in search of him.  “Yes, yes, only a question of time,” they said; “and it is our time now, Parson.  You must come with us.  No monopoly of the Parson allowed, Mrs. Hunter,” and they carried him off, joining hands around him and singing the old college song, “Gaudeamus igitur.”

Stephen, who had joined eagerly in the proposal to go in search of the Parson, remained behind, and made a sign to Mercy to stay with him.  Sitting down by her side, he said gloomily,—­