ressed so very much, is beyond ordinary
powers of description.

"My name is Ellery," said the stranger. "I am the minister--the new
minister of the Regular society."

Then even Keziah blushed.

CHAPTER III

IN WHICH KEZIAH ASSUMES A GUARDIANSHIP

Didama would have given her eyeteeth--and, for that matter, the entire
upper set--to have been present in that parsonage sitting room when the
Rev. John Ellery made his appearance. But the fates were against Didama
that day and it was months afterwards before she, or any of what
Captain Zeb Mayo called the "Trumet Daily Advertisers," picked up a hint
concerning it. Keziah and Grace, acquainted with the possibilities of
these volunteer news gatherers, were silent, and the Reverend John,
being in some respects a discreet young man with a brand-new ministerial
dignity to sustain, refrained from boasting of the sensation he had
caused. He thought of it very often, usually at most inconvenient times,
and when, by all the requirements of his high calling, his thought
should have been busy with different and much less worldly matters.

"I declare!" said Mrs. Thankful Payne, after the new minister's first
call at her residence, a week after his arrival at Trumet, "if Mr.
Ellery ain't the most sympathetic man. I was readin' out loud to him
the poem my cousin Huldy B.--her that married Hannibal Ellis over to
Denboro--made up when my second husband was lost to sea, and I'd just
got to the p'int in the ninth verse where it says:

'The cruel billows crash and roar,
And the frail craft is tempest-tossed,
But the bold mariner thinks not of life, but says,
"It is the fust schooner ever I lost."'

And 'twas, too, and the last, poor thing! Well, I just got fur as this
when I looked up and there was the minister lookin' out of the window
and his face was just as red, and he kept scowlin' and bitin' his
lips. I do believe he was all but sheddin' tears. Sympathy like that I
appreciate."

As a matter of fact, Mr. Ellery had just seen Grace Van Horne pass that
window. She had not seen him, but for the moment he was back in that
disgusting study, making a frenzied toilet in the dusk and obliged to
overhear remarks pointedly personal to himself.

Grace left the parsonage soon after the supposed tramp disclosed
his identity. Her farewells were hurried and she firmly refused Mrs.
Coffin's not too-insistent appeal to return to the house "up s