p the hill the
environs of the town and the town itself spread out behind him in the
stillness of the Sabbath, and the quails and fall birds piped and
cackled low in the corn and the grain stubble. Some wild-geese in the
south flew over the low gray woods towards the bay; a pack of hounds
somewhere bayed like distant music; he heard the turkeys gobble, at one
of the adjacent farms on the swells in the marshy landscape, where
abundance, not otherwise denoted, showed in the fat poultry that roosted
in the trees like living fruit and spoke apoplectically.

While he drank in the wine of autumn on the air, that had a bare taste
of frost, like the first acid in the sweet cider, he saw a carriage or
two come over the level roads towards Princess Anne, and the church-bell
told their errand as it dropped into the serenity its fruity twang, like
a pippin rolling from the bough. So easily, so musically, so regularly
it rang, like the voice of something pure, that was steady even in its
joys, that the Judge took off his broad white fur hat, as if to a lady,
and listened with something between courtesy and piety.

As the bell continued other carriages came towards town, and some passed
him, their inmates all bowing, and often stealing a look back to see
Judge Custis again, the first man in the county.

They looked upon an humbled heart, a gladdened soul, which the sharp
hand of affliction had made to bleed, while an unforeseen Providence in
his darling child had kissed the wound to sleep and sucked the poison
from it.

Raising his brow towards the bright blue sky, as if he could not raise
it high enough to feel more of that heavenly rest encinctured there, the
Judge sighed forth a happy wish, like the kiss of love after a quarrel,
when doubt is all dispelled or wrong forgiven:

"O make me as a little child! Wash out my stains! Lead me in the path my
child has walked, or I shall never see her in the life to come!"

His lips trembled and his breast heaved convulsively. In that idea of
being unfit to enter where his child would go, in the more abundant life
beyond the present, he received a distinct sermon from the long-empty
pulpit of nature and conscience, and revelations from within clearer
than Holy Scriptures; for he felt the justice of the final separation of
the impure from the pure, and the faith of perseverance in good to draw
onward towards holiness itself, and perseverance in sensuality and
selfishness to detain the sp