ity, or for
conscience' sake was best known to herself. Her puritanical cousin, Mrs.
Col. Selby, and a very worthy woman she was, regarded Mrs. St. Leger as
a heretic, and looked upon the troubles with her children as a just
punishment for having left the Church of her fathers. She had herself,
however, meantime made very considerable concessions to her own
religious convictions. For, while stoutly believing in sprinkling, in
infant baptism, in open communion, and in each and every tenet of
Presbyterianism, she had actually been received into the Calvinistic
Baptist Church! What an unheard-of thing! It created no little talk
among the good people of Newberg, and more for this reason: Mrs. Job
Manning, a farmer's wife, who dutifully assisted her husband in earning
a frugal living on the rocky sides of King's Hill, having been a
Congregationalist, had been refused years previously, admittance to this
same Church. She was poor, had a family of young children, had no way of
traveling thirty miles to her own nearest meeting-house, and had humbly
begged, with her husband, who was already a good Baptist, to be received
into the Church. Failing this, since she could not consent to immersion,
and shrank from the doctrine of close communion, she, or rather her
husband, demanded that she might be allowed to partake occasionally of
the Lord's Supper.

Rev. Mr. Savage, and the dignified Deacon Gould, and his equally
dignified colleague, Deacon Drake, gazed very solemnly down upon the
communion table, pursing up their mouths most decidedly, as if a
sacrilege had already been committed by so astounding a proposition. Of
course the duty fell upon Mr. Savage, the minister, to declare before
all present that the demand of brother Manning, in behalf of his wife,
was unreasonable, incomprehensible, and un-Christian.

Was Mrs. Manning a Christian? Then let her be baptized in a Christian
manner, and thereby show herself worthy to eat the bread and drink the
wine. Until such time there could be no admittance.

The two solemn-looking deacons on either side of the dogmatic speaker
raised approvingly their eyes, and after balancing themselves a moment
upon their toes, settled back upon their heels as grave and decorous as
before.

Brother Job Manning arose hastily, and said:

"My wife, Nancy Manning, is as good a Christian woman as the town of
Newberg holds. I eat with her at home, thank God, and if she ain't good
enough to eat with me at