Respectfully yours,

Myrtle hazard.

The Rev. Mr. Stoker uttered a cry of rage as he finished this awkwardly written, but tolerably intelligible letter.  What could he do about it?  It would hardly do to stab Myrtle Hazard, and shoot Byles Gridley, and strangle Mrs. Hopkins, every one of which homicides he felt at the moment that he could have committed.  And here he was in a frantic paroxysm, and the next day was Sunday, and his morning’s discourse was unwritten.  His savage mediaeval theology came to his relief, and he clutched out of a heap of yellow manuscripts his well-worn “convulsion-fit” sermon.  He preached it the next day as if it did his heart good, but Myrtle Hazard did not hear it, for she had gone to St. Bartholomew’s with Olive Eveleth.

CHAPTER XVII.

SAINT AND SINNER

It happened a little after this time that the minister’s invalid wife improved—­somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the physician advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of her life by going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful companionship.  She was therefore frequently at the house of Olive Eveleth; and as Myrtle wanted to see young people, and had her own way now as never before, the three girls often met at the parsonage.  Thus they became more and more intimate, and grew more and more into each other’s affections.

These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to be found in all our towns and villages.  Olive had been carefully trained, and at the proper age confirmed.  Bathsheba had been prayed for, and in due time startled and converted.  Myrtle was a simple daughter of Eve, with many impulses like those of the other two girls, and some that required more watching.  She was not so safe, perhaps, as either of the other girls, for this world or the next; but she was on some accounts more interesting, as being a more genuine representative of that inexperienced and too easily deluded, yet always cherished, mother of our race, whom we must after all accept as embodying the creative idea of woman, and who might have been alive and happy now (though at a great age) but for a single fatal error.

The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew’s, Olive’s father, was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a cultivated man, with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader, a neat writer, a safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental pasturage, which his sermons kept cropped moderately close without any exhausting demand upon the soil.  Olive had grown insensibly into her religious maturity, as into her bodily and intellectual developments, which one might suppose was the natural order of things in a well-regulated Christian—­household, where the children are brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.