I am, or rather was, a minister, of the Sandemanian connection.  I was settled in the active, wide-awake town of Naguadavick, on one of the finest water-powers in Maine.  We used to call it a Western town in the heart of the civilization of New England.  A charming place it was and is.  A spirited, brave young parish had I; and it seemed as if we might have all “the joy of eventful living” to our hearts’ content.

Alas! how little we knew on the day of my ordination, and in those halcyon moments of our first housekeeping!  To be the confidential friend in a hundred families in the town,—­cutting the social trifle, as my friend Haliburton says, “from the top of the whipped-syllabub to the bottom of the sponge-cake, which is the foundation,”—­to keep abreast of the thought of the age in one’s study, and to do one’s best on Sunday to interweave that thought with the active life of an active town, and to inspirit both and make both infinite by glimpses of the Eternal Glory, seemed such an exquisite forelock into one’s life!  Enough to do, and all so real and so grand!  If this vision could only have lasted!

The truth is, that this vision was not in itself a delusion, nor, indeed, half bright enough.  If one could only have been left to do his own business, the vision would have accomplished itself and brought out new paraheliacal visions, each as bright as the original.  The misery was and is, as we found out, I and Polly, before long, that, besides the vision, and besides the usual human and finite failures in life, (such as breaking the old pitcher that came over in the “Mayflower,” and putting into the fire the Alpenstock with which her father climbed Mont Blanc,)—­besides these, I say, (imitating the style of Robinson Crusoe,) there were pitch-forked in on us a great rowen-heap of humbugs, banded down from some unknown seed-time, in which we were expected, and I chiefly, to fulfil certain public functions before the community, of the character of those fulfilled by the third row of supernumeraries who stand behind the Sepoys in the spectacle of the “Cataract of the Ganges.”  They were the duties, in a word, which one performs as member of one or another social class or subdivision, wholly distinct from what one does as A. by himself A. What invisible power put these functions on me, it would be very hard to tell.  But such power there was and is.  And I had not been at work a year before I found I was living two lives, one real and one merely functional,—­for two sets of people, one my parish, whom I loved, and the other a vague public, for whom I did not care two straws.  All this was in a vague notion, which everybody had and has, that this second life would eventually bring out some great results, unknown at present, to somebody somewhere.