evidence to wash herself all over every morning, a habit which Mrs. Mobbs thought “weakening,” and somehow connected with ethical impropriety.  When Miss Leroy was married, and first as an elderly woman became known to me, she was very inconsequential in her opinions, or at least appeared so to our eyes.  She must have been much more so when she was younger.  In our town we were all formed upon recognised patterns, and those who possessed any one mark of the pattern, had all.  The wine-merchant, for example, who went to church, eminently respectable, Tory, by no means associating with the tradesfolk who displayed their goods in the windows, knowing no “experience,” and who had never felt the outpouring of the Spirit, was a specimen of a class like him.  Another class was represented by the dissenting ironmonger, deacon, presiding at prayer-meetings, strict Sabbatarian, and believer in eternal punishments; while a third was set forth by “Guffy,” whose real name was unknown, who got drunk, unloaded barges, assisted at the municipal elections, and was never once seen inside a place of worship.  These patterns had existed amongst us from the dimmest antiquity, and were accepted as part of the eternal order of things; so much so, that the deacon, although he professed to be sure that nobody who had not been converted would escape the fire—­and the wine-merchant certainly had not been converted—­was very far from admitting to himself that the wine-merchant ought to be converted, or that it would be proper to try and convert him.  I doubt, indeed, whether our congregation would have been happy, or would have thought any the better of him, if he had left the church.  Such an event, however, could no more come within the reach of our vision than a reversal of the current of our river.  It would have broken up our foundations and party-walls, and would have been considered as ominous, and anything but a subject for thankfulness.  But Miss Leroy was not the wine-merchant, nor the ironmonger, nor Guffy, and even now I cannot trace the hidden centre of union from which sprang so much that was apparently irreconcilable.  She was a person whom nobody could have created in writing a novel, because she was so inconsistent.  As I have said before, she studied Thomas a Kempis, and her little French Bible was brown with constant use.  But then she read much fiction in which there were scenes which would have made our hair stand on end.  The only thing she constantly abhorred in books was what was dull and opaque.  Yet, as we shall see presently, her dislike to dulness, once at least in her life, notably failed her.  She was not Catholic, and professed herself Protestant, but such a Protestantism!  She had no sceptical doubts.  She believed implicitly that the Bible was the Word of God, and that everything in it was true, but her interpretation of it was of the strangest kind.  Almost all our great doctrines seemed shrunk to nothing in her eyes, while others, which were nothing