of no "airs." He entered and went, the cook said,
by the back gate, always wiped his feet at the door, and appeared like a
person of not much "bringing up." One day Agnes had to descend to the
kitchen, and there she saw a strange man eating with the cook; a rough
person with a head of dark red hair and grayish red beard all round his
mouth and under his chin. She observed that he was one-legged, and used
a common wooden crutch on the side of the wooden leg. Two long scars
covered his face, and one shaggy eyebrow was higher than the other.

"I axes your pardon," said the man; "me and cook takes our snack when we
can, mum."

A day or two after Agnes passed the same man again at the landing on the
stairway. He bowed, and said in his Scotch or Irish dialect,

"God bless ye, mum!"

Agnes thought to herself that she had not given the man credit for a
certain rough grace which she now perceived, and as she turned back to
look at him he was looking at her with a fixed, incomprehensible
expression.

"Am I being watched?" thought Agnes.

One day, in early June, as Agnes entered the parlor, she found Reverend
Silas Van de Lear there. At the sight of this good old man, the
patriarch of Kensington, by whom she had been baptized and received into
the communion, Agnes Wilt felt strongly moved, the more that in his eyes
was a regard of sympathy just a little touched with doubt.

"My daughter!" exclaimed the old man, in his clear, practised
articulation, "you are daily in my prayers!"

The tears came to Agnes, and as she attempted to wipe them away the good
old gentleman drew her head to his shoulder.

"I cannot let myself think any evil of you, dear sister, in God's
chastising providence," said the clergyman. "Among the angels, in the
land that is awaiting me, I had expected to see the beautiful face
which has so often encouraged my preaching, and looked up at me from
Sabbath-school and church. You do not come to our meetings any more. My
dear, let us pray together in your affliction."

The old man knelt in the parlor and raised his voice in prayer--a clear,
considerate, judicial, sincere prayer, such as age and long authority
gave him the right to address to heaven. He was not unacquainted with
sorrow himself; his children had given him much concern, and even
anguish, and in Calvin was his last hope. A thread of wicked commonplace
ran through them all; his sterling nature in their composition was lost
like a grain of gold