I am not sure whether this preface had not better have remained unwritten; whether the parable had not better be left without an interpretation.  But it is written and it shall stand.  And so this simple story goes from my hands, I trust to do some little good, by hinting to clerical readers how some problems concerning Christian work appear to a layman’s mind, and by quickening lay readers to share more generously in their pastors’ labors and to understand more sympathetically their pastor’s trials.

Lyman Abbott.

The Knoll, Cornwall on the Hudson, N. Y.

LAICUS.

CHAPTER I.

How I happened to go to Wheathedge.

About sixty miles north of New York city,—­not as the crow flies, for of the course of that bird I have no knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief, but as the Mary Powell ploughs her way up the tortuous channel of the Hudson river,—­lies the little village of Wheathedge.  A more beautiful site even this most beautiful of rivers does not possess.  As I sit now in my library, I raise my eyes from my writing and look east to see the morning sun just rising in the gap and pouring a long golden flood of light upon the awaking village below and about me, and gilding the spires of the not far distant city of Newtown, and making even its smoke ethereal, as though throngs of angels hung over the city unrecognized by its too busy inhabitants.  Before me the majestic river broadens out into a bay where now the ice-boats play back and forth, and day after day is repeated the merry dance of many skaters—­about the only kind of dance I thoroughly believe in.  If I stand on the porch upon which one of my library windows opens, and look to the east, I see the mountain clad with its primeval forest, crowding down to the water’s edge.  It looks as though one might naturally expect to come upon a camp of Indian wigwams there.  Two years ago a wild-cat was shot in those same woods and stuffed by the hunters, and it still stands in the ante-room of the public school, the first, and last, and only contribution to an incipient museum of natural history which the sole scientific enthusiast of Wheathedge has founded—­in imagination.  Last year Harry stumbled on a whole nest of rattlesnakes, to his and their infinite alarm—­and to ours too when afterwards he told us the story of his adventure.  If I turn and look to the other side of the river, I see a broad and laughing valley,—­grim in the beautiful death of winter now however,—­through which the Newtown railroad, like the Star of Empire, westward takes its way.  For the village of Wheathedge, scattered along the mountain side, looks down from its elevated situation on a wide expanse of country.  Like Jerusalem of old,—­only, if I can judge anything from the accounts of Palestinian travelers, a good deal more so,—­it is beautiful for situation, and deserves to be the joy of the whole earth.