your hearts. He
waited four years; and then, discouraged, he married another woman.
Gentlemen, three days after the wedding his old sweetheart's husband
died, and she was released from bondage. Was not that the hand of the
Supreme Arbiter? If he had waited but three days more, the old
happiness might have lived.

"But wait! One month after that day the young man was arrested, taken
to a Western State, tried for murder, and hanged. Do you see the point?
In three days more the girl who had sold herself into slavery for the
salvation of those she loved would have been released from her bondage
only to marry a murderer!"

There was silence, in which all five listened to that wild moaning of
the storm. There seemed to be something in it now--something more than
the inarticulate sound of wind and trees. Forsythe scratched a match
and relighted his cigar.

"I never thought of such things in just that light," he said.

"Listen to the wind," said the little priest. "Hear the pine-trees
shriek out there! It recalls to me a night of years and years ago--a
night like this, when the storm moaned and twisted about my little
cabin, and when the Supreme Arbiter sent me my first penitent.
Gentlemen, it is something which will bring you nearer to an
understanding of the voice and the hand of God. It is a sermon on the
mighty significance of little things, this story of my first penitent.
If you wish, I will tell it to you."

"Go on," said Forsythe.

The traveling men drew nearer.

"It was a night like this," repeated Father Charles, "and it was in a
great wilderness like this, only miles and miles away. I had been sent
to establish a mission; and in my cabin, that wild night, alone and
with the storm shrieking about me, I was busy at work sketching out my
plans. After a time I grew nervous. I did not smoke then, and so I had
nothing to comfort me but my thoughts; and, in spite of my efforts to
make them otherwise, they were cheerless enough. The forest grew to my
door. In the fiercer blasts I could hear the lashing of the pine-trees
over my head, and now and then an arm of one of the moaning trees would
reach down and sweep across my cabin roof with a sound that made me
shudder and fear. This wilderness fear is an oppressive and terrible
thing when you are alone at night, and the world is twisting and
tearing itself outside. I have heard the pine-trees shriek like dying
women, I have heard them wailing like lost children, I hav