ife, irreproachable in outward
act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though
unloved and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their
health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish. As
years wore on, shedding their snows above his sable veil, he acquired
a name throughout the New England churches, and they called him Father
Hooper. Nearly all his parishioners who were of mature age when he was
settled had been borne away by many a funeral: he had one congregation
in the church and a more crowded one in the churchyard; and, having
wrought so late into the evening and done his work so well, it was now
good Father Hooper's turn to rest.

Several persons were visible by the shaded candlelight in the
death-chamber of the old clergyman. Natural connections he had none.
But there was the decorously grave though unmoved physician, seeking
only to mitigate the last pangs of the patient whom he could not save.
There were the deacons and other eminently pious members of his
church. There, also, was the Reverend Mr. Clark of Westbury, a young
and zealous divine who had ridden in haste to pray by the bedside of
the expiring minister. There was the nurse--no hired handmaiden of
Death, but one whose calm affection had endured thus long in secrecy,
in solitude, amid the chill of age, and would not perish even at the
dying-hour. Who but Elizabeth! And there lay the hoary head of good
Father Hooper upon the death-pillow with the black veil still swathed
about his brow and reaching down over his face, so that each more
difficult gasp of his faint breath caused it to stir. All through life
that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had
separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love and kept him
in that saddest of all prisons his own heart; and still it lay upon
his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his darksome chamber and shade
him from the sunshine of eternity.

For some time previous his mind had been confused, wavering doubtfully
between the past and the present, and hovering forward, as it were, at
intervals, into the indistinctness of the world to come. There had
been feverish turns which tossed him from side to side and wore away
what little strength he had. But in his most convulsive struggles and
in the wildest vagaries of his intellect, when no other thought
retained its sober influence, he still showed an awful solicitude lest
the black veil should slip asi