CHAPTER I

SART

THE ORDINATION DINNER

ARTAIN sure, they be scripchural, fur they eat what is set before 'em."

Tom Blanket gave a glance down the long tables as he lifted a quarter of a pumpkin pie on to his plate and attacked it vigorously with his knife. It was the ordination dinner, spread in the prayer-meeting room of Padanaram meeting-house. The tables were loaded with roast spareribs, chicken pies, pork tenderloins, baked beans, mince and pumpkin pies and great platters of brown, crisp doughnuts that dropped of the fatness of the land. The coffee was black and bitter; and the tea was blacker and bitterer.

"Thar's one thet 's off his feed." Deacon Buffington nodded, as he spoke, toward the table on the platform at the end of the room, at which sat the visiting clergymen, and with them Simeon Craig, the new pastor of the church in Padanaram, that day ordained to the preaching of the Gospel. Craig had eaten nothing save a bowl of johnny-cake and milk.

"It's kinder like flyin' in the face o' Providence to balk at sech a meal as this," Blanket declared.

"You hain't temptin' Providence one mite, be you?" grunted Peleg Singleton, who kept store and was postmaster.

"I try to live up to the r'sponsibilities o' Christian opportunities," Tom answered. "But it kinder seems

ef 't was eatin' we wanted done we need n't a' gone outside Padynaram."

"Wall, when I 've got work to du, I want a hoss or a critter thet kin eat," the deacon reasserted. "The Ol' Feller's tu smart to be much scart of a minister thet eats johnny-cake."

"I ruther take tu the way Elder Babbitt puts away vittles," Singleton affirmed. He had a practical mind for grocery bills.

Elder Babbitt, a visiting clergyman, was still at work at a plate heaped high with the solid food of the feast.

"Wall," Blanket admitted, "it did seem's ef he would n't leave no dust in thet thar pulpit cushion."

The women talked in low whispers and without continuity, dominated by the presence of their husbands and the visiting clergymen. Ignorant of the deference that convention yields to woman, they felt the deterrence of the masculine mass, where the individual would have proved incentive. The weight of inherited traditions, which kept them silent in the meeting, oppressed them in the presence of much that stood to them as the outward symbol of the church itself.

The young girls of the congregation, ranging from fifteen to twenty, with a spinster or two who had forgotten to count the years, were acting as waitresses, and were to eat at a second table, in company with the larger boys and unmarried men, who were waiting about the horse-sheds, impatient under hunger and the long postponement of all that was attractive to them in the ordination service. Now and then one, more bold than the others, came and pressed his face against the low windows, taking account of the progress of the meal, and catching a glimpse of the hurrying figures in bright

calicoes or fresh muslin, which were the festive garb of Padanaram maidenhood in the early fifties.

"You'd better keep a eye on Rebecca Marsh, Tom Wilson," cried a half-grown lad who had taken his place at the window. "She 's mighty keerful o' the new pahson!"

The man addressed, tall, ungainly, but not unhandsome in his honesty of expression, flushed to the roots of his yellow hair.

"Darn a unmarried min'ster any way," he muttered, as he came out from under the shed, pocketing the jackknife with which he had been whittling a partition. "We might's well be Cath'lics an' done 'th it!”

When he reached the window, Rebecca Marsh was offering the new minister a savoury-looking quarter of mince pie, which he was declining with persistent gravity. The sense of temerity in thus venturing to the very head table, had brought a flush to her cheek that made her more than usually attractive. Wilson saw it, at a glance, and grumbled under his breath.

"Sorter get thee behin' me, Satan, about him, hain't thar?" demanded the lad, who, like his elders, drew his similes from but one source.

"Be yer hin'-eend achin' to be kicked?" snorted Wilson, only to be greeted by a shout of derision from his companions.

"I tell ye what, Tom," one of them suggested, as he sauntered gloomily back to the horse-shed, "ef I 's you, I'd give the new pahson his fust job o' marryin', ef she 'd hev me."

"She won't!" the boy at the window shouted. "He's took a doughnut from her."

"But he hain't eatin' it," a second boy, drawn by curiosity to the window, declared. "He's jest laid it on his plate."

"The ol' feller 't preached this mornin's goin' to ax a blessin'. Better come an' hear it, Tom," the first boy called.

"Darn him!" Wilson growled, made reckless by his jealousy. "He slops words like a mill-pon' in a spring freshet!"

"Gosh! He's through," the boy exclaimed, "He's too high fed to hev any wind."

The clergymen came out and were conducted to one of the neighbouring houses to rest until supper and evening preaching. The older men filed out to the horse-sheds to discuss the sermon and the crops, while the young men and boys hurried in to their own feeding. One of them, as he passed Tom Blanket, hailed him. "Be thar enything left, Tom?"

"'Bout twelve baskets o' fragments, I sh'd say," Tom answered.

"Wall, it's a mericle, a'ter the way they did stuff 'emsel's."

"Look here, Bub," Tom began, catching him by the jacket to get time to expound his philosophy, “you 'll allus fin' a clar conscience and a good appetite keepin' comp'ny like a hahnsum gal an' her bes' feller, an' thar did n't 'pear to be but one oneasy conscience in thar to-day."

CHAPTER II

FROM

SIMEON CRAIG

ROM the forty houses which made up the village of Padanaram, one only gleam of light shone into the dark: one earthly star among the points of light that dotted the blue blackness of the heavens. The lanes and ways that wound among the scattered houses were unlighted. When social or religious duties called a Padanaramite into the night, he bore his own lantern. At nine o'clock these lights had been as frequent as fireflies over a June lowland. Now the village slept under the stars. A cock sounded his midnight challenge, and a distant housedog gave a single bark.

Padanaram had seen no other such day as that now closed, on which the Reverend Simeon Craig had been installed pastor of the village church, as well as ordained to the ministry. The ordination sermon had been preached by a Doctor of Divinity from Millbank, and another from Augusta had shared in the laying on of hands. Now, not a bed was vacant in the village, though most of the lads were sleeping on the hay in the It was a day to live in village memory.

mows.

To the Reverend Simeon Craig, who stood at the low window looking into the blackness, this single candle, companioned only by heavenly lights, was at once a symbol and an inspiration. The exaltation of spirit to which the events of the day had been confirmation, was yet undimmed. For him, firmly set in the holiness of his mission, the possibility that it could ever grow