for the company of the meek non-combatants who follow with the baggage and provisions.  Age, illness, too much wear and tear, a half-formed paralysis, may bring any of us to this pass.  But while we can think and maintain the rights of our own individuality against every human combination, let as not forget to caution all who are disposed to waver that there is a cowardice which is criminal, and a longing for rest which it is baseness to indulge.  God help him over whose dead soul in his living body must be uttered the sad supplication, Requiescat in pace!

* * * * *

A knock at the Reverend Mr. Fairweather’s study-door called his eyes from the book on which they were intent.  He looked up, as if expecting a welcome guest.

The Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D.D., entered the study of the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather.  He was not the expected guest.  Mr. Fairweather slipped the book he was reading into a half-open drawer, and pushed in the drawer.  He slid something which rattled under a paper lying on the table.  He rose with a slight change of color, and welcomed, a little awkwardly, his unusual visitor.

“Good evening, Brother Fairweather!” said the Reverend Doctor, in a very cordial, good-humored way.  “I hope I am not spoiling one of those eloquent sermons I never have a chance to hear.”

“Not at all, not at all,” the younger clergyman answered, in a languid tone, with a kind of habitual half-querulousness which belonged to it,—­the vocal expression which we meet with now and then, and which says as plainly as so many words could say it, “I am a suffering individual.  I am persistently undervalued, wronged, and imposed upon by mankind and the powers of the universe generally.  But I endure all.  I endure you.  Speak.  I listen.  It is a burden to me, but I even approve.  I sacrifice myself.  Behold this movement of my lips!  It is a smile.”

The Reverend Doctor knew this forlorn way of Mr. Fairweather’s, and was not troubled by it.  He proceeded to relate the circumstances of his visit from the old black woman, and the fear she was in about the young girl, who being a parishioner of Mr. Fairweather’s, he had thought it best to come over and speak to him about old Sophy’s fears and fancies.

In telling the old woman’s story, he alluded only vaguely to those peculiar circumstances to which she had attributed so much importance, taking it for granted that the other minister must be familiar with the whole series of incidents she had related.  The old minister was mistaken, as we have before seen.  Mr. Fairweather had been settled in the place only about ten years, and, if he had heard a strange hint now and then about Elsie, had never considered it as anything more than idle and ignorant, if not malicious, village-gossip.  All that he fully understood was that this had been a perverse and unmanageable child, and that the extraordinary care which had been bestowed on her had been so far thrown away that she was a dangerous, self-willed girl, whom all feared and almost all shunned, as if she carried with her some malignant influence.