“Crowder, you puff me up,” murmured Uncle Issy, charmed with this imaginative and wholly flattering sketch.  “No—­really now!  Though, indeed, strange words have gone abroad before now, touching my wisdom; but I blow no trumpet.”

“Such be your very words,” the crowder insisted.  “Now mark my answer.  ‘Uncle Issy,’ says I, quick as thought, ’you dunderheaded old antic,—­ leave that to the musicianers.  At the word ‘whales,’ let the music go snorty; an’ for wells, gliddery; an’ likewise in a moving dulcet manner for the holy an’ humble Men o’ heart.’  Why, ’od rabbet us!—­what’s wrong wi’ that boy?”

All turned to Young Zeb, from whose throat uncomfortable sounds were issuing.  His eyes rolled piteously, and great tears ran down his cheeks.

“Slap en ’pon the back, Calvin:  he’s chuckin’.”

“Ay—­an’ the pa’son at’ here endeth!’”

“Slap en, Calvin, quick!  For ‘tis clunk or stuffle, an’ no time to lose.”

Down in the nave a light rustle of expectancy was already running from pew to pew as Calvin Oke brought down his open palm with a whack! knocking the sufferer out of his seat, and driving his nose smartly against the back-rail in front.

Then the voice of Parson Babbage was lifted:  “I publish the Banns of marriage between Zebedee Minards, bachelor, and Ruby Tresidder, spinster, both of this parish.  If any of you know cause, or just impediment, why these two persons—­”

At this instant the church-door flew open, as if driven in by the wind that tore up the aisle in an icy current.  All heads were turned.  Parson Babbage broke off his sentence and looked also, keeping his forefinger on the fluttering page.  On the threshold stood an excited, red-faced man, his long sandy beard blown straight out like a pennon, and his arms moving windmill fashion as he bawled—­

“A wreck! a wreck!”

The men in the congregation leaped up.  The women uttered muffled cries, groped for their husbands’ hats, and stood up also.  The choir in the gallery craned forward, for the church-door was right beneath them.  Parson Babbage held up his hand, and screamed out over the hubbub—­

“Where’s she to?”

“Under Bradden Point, an’ comin’ full tilt for the Raney!”

“Then God forgive all poor sinners aboard!” spoke up a woman’s voice, in the moment’s silence that followed.

“Is that all you know, Gauger Hocken?”

“Iss, iss:  can’t stop no longer—­must be off to warn the Methodeys!  ’Stablished Church first, but fair play’s a jewel, say I.”

He rushed off inland towards High Lanes, where the meeting-house stood.  Parson Babbage closed the book without finishing his sentence, and his audience scrambled out over the graves and forth upon the headland.  The wind here came howling across the short grass, blowing the women’s skirts wide and straining their bonnet-strings, pressing the men’s trousers tight against their shins as they bent against it in the attitude of butting rams and scanned the coast-line to the sou’-west.  Ruby Tresidder, on gaining the porch, saw Young Zeb tumble out of the stairway leading from the gallery and run by, stowing the pieces of his flute in his pocket as he went, without a glance at her.  Like all the rest, he had clean forgotten the banns.