first people.  Why, Doctor Stiles doesn’t think so, and I’m sure he’s a good Christian.  Doctor Stiles thinks it’s a dispensation for giving the light of the gospel to the Africans.  Why, now I’m sure, when I was a-workin’ at Deacon Stebbins’, I stopped over Sunday once ’cause Miss Stebbins she was weakly,—­’twas when she was getting up, after Samuel was born,—­no, on the whole, I believe it was Nehemiah,—­but, any way, I remember I staid there, and I remember, as plain as if ’twas yesterday, just after breakfast, how a man went driving by in a chaise, and the Deacon he went out and stopped him (’cause you know he was justice of the peace) for travelling on the Lord’s day, and who should it be but Tom Seaforth?—­he told the Deacon his father had got a ship-load of negroes just come in,—­and the Deacon he just let him go; ’cause I remember he said that was a plain work of necessity and mercy.[A] Well, now who would ‘a’ thought it?  I believe the Doctor is better than most folks, but then the best people may be mistaken, you know.”

[Footnote A:  A fact.]

“The Doctor has made up his mind that it’s his duty,” said Mrs. Scudder.  “I’m afraid it will make him very unpopular; but I, for one, shall stand by him.”

“Oh, certainly, Miss Scudder, you are doing just right exactly.  Well, there’s one comfort, he’ll have a great crowd to hear him preach; ’cause, as I was going round through the entries last night, I heard ’em talking about it,—­and Colonel Burr said he should be there, and so did the General, and so did Mr. What’s-his-name there, that Senator from Philadelphia.  I tell you, you’ll have a full house.”

It was to be confessed that Mrs. Scudder’s heart rather sunk than otherwise at this announcement; and those who have felt what it is to stand almost alone in the right, in the face of all the first families of their acquaintance, may perhaps find some compassion for her,—­since, after all, truth is invisible, but “first families” are very evident.  First families are often very agreeable, undeniably respectable, fearfully virtuous, and it takes great faith to resist an evil principle which incarnates itself in the suavities of their breeding and amiability; and therefore it was that Mrs. Scudder felt her heart heavy within her, and could with a very good grace have joined in the Doctor’s Saturday fast.

As for the Doctor, he sat the while tranquil in his study, with his great Bible and his Concordance open before him, culling, with that patient assiduity for which he was remarkable, all the terrible texts which that very unceremonious and old-fashioned book rains down so unsparingly on the sin of oppressing the weak.

First families, whether in Newport or elsewhere, were as invisible to him as they were to Moses during the forty days that he spent with God on the mount; he was merely thinking of his message,—­thinking only how he should shape it, so as not to leave one word of it unsaid,—­not even imagining in the least what the result of it was to be.  He was but a voice, but an instrument,—­the passive instrument through which an almighty will was to reveal itself; and the sublime fatalism of his faith made him as dead to all human considerations as if he had been a portion of the immutable laws of Nature herself.