prosperous and hospitable farmhouses, with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns; the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives served up with their own skilled hands.  Of course, he admitted to himself, it would not be the same if he were to go back there again.  He was conscious of having moved along—­was it, after all, an advance?—­to a point where it was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant hired man, and still worse to encounter the bucolic confusion between the functions of knives and forks.  But in those happy days—­young, zealous, himself farm-bred—­these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there among those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast with the gaunt surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological seminary, luxuriously abundant and free.

It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth—­nay, should he not say of all his days?—­had come to him.  There he had first seen Alice Hastings,—­the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely self-reliant girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be heard washing the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.

How wonderful she had seemed to him then!  How beautiful and all-beneficent the miracle still appeared!  Though herself the daughter of a farmer, her presence on a visit within the borders of his remote country charge had seemed to make everything, there a hundred times more countrified than it had ever been before.  She was fresh from the refinements of a town seminary:  she read books; it was known that she could play upon the piano.  Her clothes, her manners, her way of speaking, the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue—­not least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding as to her father’s wealth—­placed her on a glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of the neighborhood.  These honest and good-hearted creatures indeed called ceaseless attention to her superiority by their deference and open-mouthed admiration, and treated it as the most natural thing in the world that their young minister should be visibly “taken” with her.

Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his the following spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance.  His new appointment was to Tyre—­a somewhat distant village of traditional local pride and substance—­and he was to be married only a day or so before entering upon his pastoral duties there.  The good people among whom he had begun his ministry took kindly credit to themselves that he had met his bride while she was “visiting round” their countryside.  In part by jocose inquiries addressed to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences of the postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency of the correspondence passing between Theron and the now remote Alice—­they had followed the progress of the courtship through the autumn and winter with friendly zest.  When he returned from the Conference, to say good-bye and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave him a “donation”—­quite as if he were a married pastor with a home of his own, instead of a shy young bachelor, who received his guests and their contributions in the house where he boarded.