THE PAGE

HERMAN OF BOHEMIA MANOR

KIDNAPPED

THE JUDGE'S LAST TUNE

DOMINION OVER THE FISH

THE CIRCUIT PREACHER

THE BIG IDIOT

A BAYSIDE IDYL

SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON'S NIGHT

PHANTOM ARCHITECT

THE LOBBY BROTHER

POTOMAC RIVER

TELL-TALE FEET

UPPER MARLB'RO'

PREACHERS' SONS IN 1849

CHESTER RIVER

OLD WASHINGTON ALMSHOUSE

OLD ST. MARY'S

KING OF CHINCOTEAGUE.

The night before Christmas, frosty moonlight, the outcast preacher
came down to the island shore and raised his hands to the stars.

"O God! whose word I so long preached in meekness and sincerity," he
cried, "have mercy on my child and its mother, who are poor as were
Thine own this morning, eighteen hundred and forty years ago!"

The moonlight scarcely fretted the soft expanse of Chincoteague Bay.
There seemed a slender hand of silver reaching down from the sky to
tremble on the long chords of the water, lying there in light and
shade, like a harp. The drowsy dash of the low surf on the bar beyond
the inlet was harsh to this still and shallow haven for wreckers and
oystermen. It was very far from any busy city or hive of men, between
the ocean and the sandy peninsula of Maryland.

But no land is so remote that it may not have its banished men. The
outcast preacher had committed the one deadly sin acknowledged amongst
those wild wreckers and watermen. It was not that he had knocked a
drowning man in the head, nor shown a false signal along the shore to
decoy a vessel into the breakers, nor darkened the lighthouse lamp.
These things had been done, but not by him.

He had married out of his race. His wife was crossed with despised
blood.

"What do you seek, preacher?" exclaimed a gruff, hard voice. "Has the
Canaanite woman driven you out from your hut this sharp weather, in
the night?"

"No," answered the outcast preacher. "My heart has sent me forth to
beg the service of your oyster-tongs, that I may dip a peck of
oysters from the cove. We are almost starved."

"And rightly starved, O psalm-singer! You were doing well. Preaching,
ha! ha! Preaching the miracle of the God in the manger, the baby of
the maid. You prayed and travelled for the good of Christians. The
time came when you practised that gospel. You married the daughter of
a slave. Then they cast you off. They outlawed you. You were made
meaner, Levin Purnell, than the Jew of Chincoteague!"

The speaker was a bearded, swarthy, low-set man, who looked out