There was something affecting in the pertinacity with which the good Doctor persevered in saying his say to his discouraging minority of hearers.  His salary was small; his meeting-house, damaged during the Revolutionary struggle, was dilapidated and forlorn,—­fireless in winter, and in summer admitting a flood of sun and dust through those great windows which formed so principal a feature in those first efforts of Puritan architecture.

Still, grand in his humility, he preached on,—­and as a soldier never asks why, but stands at apparently the most useless post, so he went on from Sunday to Sunday, comforting himself with the reflection that no one could think more meanly of his ministrations than he did himself.  “I am like Moses only in not being eloquent,” he said, in his simplicity.  “My preaching is barren and dull, my voice is hard and harsh; but then the Lord is a Sovereign, and may work through me.  He fed Elijah once through a raven, and he may feed some poor wandering soul through me.”

The only mistake made by the good man was that of supposing that the elaboration of theology was preaching the gospel.  The gospel he was preaching constantly, by his pure, unworldly living, by his visitations to homes of poverty and sorrow, by his searching out of the lowly African slaves, his teaching of those whom no one else in those days had thought of teaching, and by the grand humanity, outrunning his age, in which he protested against the then admitted system of slavery and the slave-trade.  But when, rising in the pulpit, he followed trains of thought suited only to the desk of the theological lecture-room, he did it blindly, following that law of self-development by which minds of a certain amount of fervor must utter what is in them, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear.

But the place where our Doctor was happiest was his study.  There he explored, and wandered, and read, and thought, and lived a life as wholly ideal and intellectual as heart could conceive.

And could Love enter a reverend doctor’s study, and find his way into a heart empty and swept of all those shreds of poetry and romance in which he usually finds the material of his incantations?

Even so;—­but he came so thoughtfully, so reverently, with so wise and cautious a footfall, that the good Doctor never even raised his spectacles to see who was there.  The first that he knew, poor man, he was breathing an air of strange and subtile sweetness,—­from what paradise he never stopped his studies to inquire.  He was like a great, rugged elm, with all its lacings and archings of boughs and twigs, which has stood cold and frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky, forgetful of leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly content in its naked strength and crystalline definiteness of outline.  But in April there is a rising and stirring within the grand old monster,—­a whispering of knotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing ethereally from bough to bough with a warm and gentle life; and though the old elm knows it not, a new creation is at hand.  Just so, ever since the good man had lived at Mrs. Scudder’s, and had the gentle Mary for his catechumen, a richer life seemed to have colored his thoughts,—­his mind seemed to work with a pleasure as never before.