ium of personal influence. This girl, Vashti Dethick, has exerted
her power with some success. Other persons, having felt its good effect,
have admitted its existence. The father of Vashti, an enterprising
scamp, has thereupon compelled the girl to trade upon her peculiar
faculty; little by little to assume miraculous powers; and finally to
pretend that her celestial talent is refreshed and strengthened by
abstinence from food, and that her cures are wrought only after she has
fasted for many days. He has thus converted her into an impostor; yet,
as her heart is pure and her moral principle naturally sound, she is ill
at ease in this false position, and her mental distress has suddenly
become aggravated, almost to the pitch of desperation, by the arrival of
love. She has lost her heart to a young clergyman, Judah Llewellyn, the
purity of whose spirit and the beauty of whose life are a bitter and
burning rebuke to her enforced deceitfulness of conduct. Here is a woman
innocently guilty, suddenly aroused by love, made sensitive and noble
(as that passion commonly makes those persons who really feel it), and
projected into a condition of aggrieved excitement. In this posture of
romantic and pathetic circumstances the crisis of two lives is suddenly
precipitated in action.

Judah Llewellyn also is possessed of spiritual sensibility and psychic
force. In boyhood a shepherd, he has dwelt among the mountains of his
native Wales, and his imagination has heard the voices that are in rocks
and trees, in the silence of lonely places, in the desolation of the
bleak hills, and in the cold light of distant stars. He is now a
preacher, infatuated with his mission, inspired in his eloquence,
invincible in his tremendous sincerity. He sees Vashti and he loves her.
It is the first thrill of mortal passion that ever has mingled with his
devotion to his Master's work. The attraction between these creatures is
human; and yet it is more of heaven than of earth. It is a tie of
spiritual kindred that binds them. They are beings of a different order
from the common order--and, as happens in such cases, they will be
tried by exceptional troubles and passed through a fire of mortal
anguish. For what reason experience should take the direction of misery
with fine natures in human life no philosopher has yet been able to
ascertain; but that it does take that direction all competent
observation proves. To Vashti and Judah the time speedily comes when