nelt to pray, Marion's mother saw her turning
very pale, and silently and unobserved led her out of the
meeting-house.

It was one o'clock in the morning when Judge Whaley heard Perry enter
the door. He was preceded by the beams of a lamp, as his step came
almost trippingly up the stairs. The Judge looked up and saw the face
of his demon, streaked with recent tears and shaded with dishevelled
hair, but on it a look like eternal sunshine.

"Glory! glory! glory!" exclaimed the young man hoarsely. He rushed
upon his aged friend, and kissed him in an ecstacy almost violent.

"My boy! Perry! What is it? You are not out of your mind?"

"No! no! I have found my father, our father!"

"Who is it?" asked the Judge, with a rising superstition, as if this
were not his orphan, but its preternatural copy; "you have found your
father? What father?"

"God!" exclaimed young Perry, his countenance like flame. "My father
is God and He is love!"

The town of Chester and the whole country had now a serious of rapid
sensations. Judge Whaley and his son were turned lunatics, and behaved
like a pair of boys. Marion Voss had broken her engagement with Perry
Whaley because he insisted that he was not the Judge's son. Young
Perry was exhorting in the Methodist church, and studying and starving
himself to be a preacher. The Methodists were wild with social and
denominational triumph: the Episcopalians were outraged, and meditated
sending Perry to the lunatic asylum. Finally, to the great joy of
nervous people, the last sensation came--Perry Whaley had left
Chester to be a preacher.

Judge Whaley now grew old rapidly, and meek and careless of his
attire. In an old pair of slippers, glove-less and abstracted, he
crossed the court-house green, no longer the first gentleman in the
county in courteous accost and lofty tone. He read his Bible in the
seclusion of his own house, and fishermen on the river coming in after
midnight saw the lamp-light stream through the chinks of his shutters,
and said: "He has never been the same since Perry went away." But he
read in the religious papers of the genius and power of the absent
one, roving like a young hermit loosened, and with a tongue of flame
over the length and breadth of the country, producing extraordinary
excitement and adding thousands to his humble denomination.

On Christmas Day the Judge was sitting in his great room reading the
same mystic book, and listening, with a wistfulness that ha