“Look here, friend Malcolm, I have got something against you; and as I am an independent plain-spoken man, you must not be offended with me for telling you my mind freely.”

“The truth never offends me, Mr. Larkin,” said the minister, with a smile.  “I am not faultless, though willing to correct my faults when I see them.”

“Very well.”  Mr. Larkin spoke in a resolute voice, and seemed to feel pleasure rather than pain in what he was doing.  “In the first place, then, I am sorry to find that you possess one very bad fault, common to most ministers, and that is, a disposition to live beyond your means, and then come down upon the parish to pay your debts.”

The blood came rushing to the face of the minister, which his monitor took to be the plainest kind of evidence that he had hit the nail fully upon the head.  He went on more confidently.

“Now, this, Mr. Malcolm, I consider to be very wrong—­very wrong, indeed!—­and especially so in a young minister in his first year, and in his first parish.  If such things are in the green tree, what are we to expect in the dry?  You accepted our call, and were plainly informed that the salary would be four hundred dollars and rent free.  Upon this our former minister had lived quite comfortably.  If you thought the salary too little, you should not have accepted the call—­accepting it, you should have lived upon it, if you had lived on bread and water.”

Mr. Larkin paused.  The minister stood with his eyes cast upon the pavement, but made no answer.  Mr. Larkin resumed—­

“It is such things as this that bring scandal upon the church, and drive right thinking men out of it.  It isn’t that I value a few dollars more than I do the wind; but I like to see principle; and hate all imposition.  You are a young man, Mr. Malcolm, and I speak thus plainly to you for your good.  I hope you will not feel offended.”

Mr. Larkin paused, thinking, perhaps, that he had said enough.  The minister’s eyes were still upon the pavement, from which he lifted them as soon as his monitor was done speaking.  The flush had left his cheeks, that were now pale.

“I thank you for your honesty in speaking so plainly, and will try to profit by what you have told me,” said he, calmly.  “The best of us are liable to err.”

There was something in the words, voice, and manner of the minister that Mr. Larkin did not clearly comprehend.  He had spoken harshly, and, he now felt, with some rudeness; but, while there was nothing in the air with which his reproof was received that evidenced the conviction of error there was no resentment.  A moment before, he felt like a superior severely reprimanding an inferior; but now he stood in the presence of one whose calmness and dignity oppressed him.  He was about commencing a confused apology for his apparent harshness, when Mr. Malcolm bowed and passed on.

Larkin did not feel very comfortable as he walked away.  He soon more than half repented of what he had done, and before night, by way of atonement for his error, called upon Mr. Elder, and handed him a check for twenty-five dollars, to help pay off the minister’s debt.  So much for the principle concerned.