to have their clergyman visit them in their
last days as if he granted them absolution and extreme unction. The
old traditions survive in our instincts, although our present opinions
have long since ticketed many thoughts and desires and customs as out
of date and quite exploded.

We go so far in our vigorous observance of the first commandment, and
our fear of worshiping strange gods, that sometimes we are in danger
of forgetting that we must worship God himself. And worship is
something different from a certain sort of constant church-going, or
from even trying to be conformers and to keep our own laws and our
neighbors'.

Because an old-fashioned town like Oldfields grows so slowly and with
such extreme deliberation, is the very reason it seems to have such a
delightful completeness when it has entered fairly upon its maturity.
It is possessed of kindred virtues to a winter pear, which may be
unattractive during its preparatory stages, but which takes time to
gather from the ground and from the air a pleasant and rewarding
individuality and sweetness. The towns which are built in a hurry can
be left in a hurry without a bit of regret, and if it is the fate or
fortune of the elder villages to find themselves the foundation upon
which modern manufacturing communities rear their thinly built houses
and workshops, and their quickly disintegrating communities of people,
the weaknesses of these are more glaring and hopeless in the contrast.
The hurry to make money and do much work, and the ambition to do good
work, war with each other, but, as Longfellow has said, the lie is the
hurrying second-hand of the clock, and the truth the slower hand that
waits and marks the hour. The New England that built itself houses a
hundred years ago was far less oppressed by competition and by other
questions with which the enormous increase of population is worrying
its younger citizens. And the overgrown Oldfields that increase now,
street by street, were built then a single steady sound-timbered house
at a time, and all the neighbors watched them rise, and knew where the
planks were sawn, and where the chimney bricks were burnt.

In these days when Anna Prince was young and had lately come to live
in the doctor's square house, with the three peaked windows in the
roof, and the tall box borders and lilac bushes in its neat front
yard, Oldfields was just beginning to wake from a fifty years'
architectural sleep, and rub its eyes, an