be wived by a white preacher, makes
inroads upon us _en masse_ to the detriment of decorum and our
carpets. We summarily shut down upon this business when we find that
their fees come to but half a dollar a pair.

However, the year drifts by, and we are greatly concerned to know if
it is the sentiment of Swan Neck that we shall continue its pastor
another year. Old Yeasty, Margot's father, as we are aware, feels
himself slighted because we do not call upon him of Sundays to make
the closing prayers; for Yeasty's prayer is a sermon under another
name, and runs the morning into twilight; but a sly compliment that we
pay him in a diplomatic sermon at the end of the conference year
brings him round all right, and back we go to Swan Neck.

So with burying the dead and writing their obituaries; making the
babes pure with that holy sprinkling which gives them, dying early, to
a Christian immortality; launching our thunders upon the bold,
softening the hearts of the errant, mingling with our unbending creed
the more pliable ethics of worldly graces, and, in a word, walking
like Saint John on the savage border of civilization, to thrill the
brutal and unlettered with the tidings of one just day to come--our
itinerant lives drift on till the marble slab in the meeting-house
wall writes the itinerant's only human memorial.

We have dreamed our last. Burst from the narrow chrysalis which we
would gladly rebuild again, the seething, churning sea is before us
and around us; we only catch, like the strains of bells through the
fog, the hum of hymns, the drowsy murmur of the buzzing
Sabbath-school, and the nasal ring of the itinerant's summer sermon.
Margot is married to Chough, our whilom colleague, and makes her
migration in his Bedouin train, and does not know how once she
thrilled us. The tuning-fork is rusty, and the chorister in his coffin
may hear, if he can, his successor stirring the birds in the roof with
his sonorous melody. All are at rest, and we live on--moving, moving,
moving--so deeply fastened into our natures are our early instincts;
but every night we say the same parsonage prayer, and every morning
look upon the wall where hangs the grave, grim features we revere--the
Itinerant Preacher.

CHESTER RIVER.

Wise is the wild duck winging straight to thee,
River of summer! from the cold Arctic sea,
Coming, like his fathers for centuries, to seek
The sweet, salt pastures of the far Chesapeak