He closed the door gently as he went out.  Jim Greenidge lay for some time resting upon his elbow, wondering why a boy who had scarcely ever spoken a word to him before should suddenly want to be his servant.  He could make nothing of it, and, tired with the excitement of the previous evening, he lay down again for a morning nap.

CHAPTER V.

Peewee preaching.

Upon the following Sunday the Rev. Amos Peewee, D.D., made a suitable improvement of the melancholy event of the week.  He enlarged upon the uncertainty of life.  He said that in the midst of life we are in death.  He said that we are shadows and pursue shades.  He added that we are here to-day and gone to-morrow.

During the long prayer before the sermon a violent thunder-gust swept from the west and dashed against the old wooden church.  As the Doctor poured forth his petitions he made the most extraordinary movements with his right hand.  He waved it up and down rapidly.  He opened his eyes for an instant as if to find somebody.  He seemed to be closing imaginary windows—­and so he was.  It leaked out the next day at Mr. Gray’s that Dr. Peewee was telegraphing the sexton at random—­for he did not know where to look for him—­to close the windows.  Nobody better understood the danger of draughts from windows, during thunder-storms, than the Doctor; nobody knew better than he that the lightning-rod upon the spire was no protection at all, but that the iron staples with which it was clamped to the building would serve, in case of a bolt’s striking the church, to drive its whole force into the building.  As a loud crash burst over the village in the midst of his sermon, and showed how frightfully near the storm was, his voice broke into a shrill quaver, as he faltered out, “Yes, my brethren, let us be calm under all circumstances, and Death will have no terrors.”

The Rev. Amos Peewee had been settled in the village of Delafield since a long period before the Revolution, according to the boys.  But the parish register carried the date only to the beginning of this century.  He wore a silken gown in summer, and a woolen gown in winter, and black worsted gloves, always with the middle finger of the right-hand glove slit, that he might more conveniently turn the leaves of the Bible, and the hymn-book, and his own sermons.

The pews of the old meeting-house were high, and many of them square.  The heads of the people of consideration in the congregation were mostly bald, as beseems respectable age, and as the smooth, shiny line of pates appeared above the wooden line of the pews they somehow sympathetically blended into one gleaming surface of worn wood and skull, until it seemed as if the Doctor’s theological battles were all fought upon the heads of his people.