g. They called him the enfant phrenomeny. He exhorted at five
year old, and at seven give his experyins."

"Rare, Miss Rhoda," the rector said, hardly able to keep his reverence
in amusement at her impetuosity.

"Oh, he made a wild excitemins, Aunt Vesty. The women give each other
their babies to hold while they tuk turns a-shouting. 'Yer, Becky, hold
my baby while I shout!' says one. 'Now, Nancy, hold mine while I shout!'
To see that little boy up thar tellin' of his experyins was meriklus,
an' made an excitemins like the high tides on Jinkotig that drowns' em
out. But, Aunt Vesty, that little phrenomeny was a dwarf, twenty year
old, an' Misc Somers found it out and told about it."

"I'll be bound Mrs. Somers knows!" exclaimed the Judge.

"That she do," continued Rhoda, earnestly, with a slight sniffle of a
well-modelled nose and a dimpling that argued to Vesta something to
come. "Misc Somers says you held one of them babies, Jedge, to let its
mother shout, and pretended to be under a conviction; an' that you
backslid right thar and was a-whisperin' to the other mother. Lord
sakes! Misc Somers finds it all out."

"Well," said the Judge, finding the laugh against him, "I never did
better electioneering than that day. By holding that baby five minutes I
made a vote, and the mother will hold it twenty years before she will
make a vote."

"Misc Somers says, Jedge, you hold the women longer than thar babies;
but I told her you was in sech conviction you didn't know one from the
other. 'Oh,' she says, 'he's sly and safe when he gits over yer on the
Worcester side.' Misc Somers, she's dreadful plain."

William Tilghman, during the continuation of this colloquy, looked with
interest on the two young ladies: Vesta, the elder by two or three
years, and richly endowed with the lights of both beauty and
accomplishments; the maid from the ocean side, plainer, and with no
ornament within or without; but he could foresee, under Vesta's
fostering, a graceful woman, with coquetry and fascination not wholly
latent there; and, as his eyes met Rhoda's, he interpreted the look that
at a certain time of life almost every maiden casts on meeting a young
man--"Is he single?" She shot this look so archly, yet so strong, that
the arrow wounded him a very little as it glanced off. He smiled, but
the consciousness was restored a moment that he was a young man still,
as well as a priest. Love, which had closed a door like the portal of a
t