nce, one is more dramatic than
all, more charged with power and pathos. Years ago there came into
Tiverton an unknown man, very handsome, showing the marks of high
breeding, and yet in his bearing strangely solitary and remote. He wore
a cloak, and had a foreign look. He came walking into the town one
night, with dust upon his shoes, and we judged that he had been
traveling a long time. He had the appearance of one who was not nearly
at his journey's end, and would pass through the village, continuing on
a longer way. He glanced at no one, but we all stared at him. He seemed,
though we had not the words to put it so, an exiled prince. He went
straight through Tiverton Street until he came to the parsonage; and
something about it (perhaps its garden, hot with flowers, larkspur,
coreopsis, and the rest) detained his eye, and he walked in. Next day
the old doctor was there also with his little black case, but we were
none the wiser for that; for the old doctor was of the sort who intrench
themselves in a professional reserve. You might draw up beside the road
to question him, but you could as well deter the course of nature. He
would give the roan a flick, and his sulky would flash by.

"What's the matter with so-and-so?" would ask a mousing neighbor.

"He's sick," ran the laconic reply.

"Goin' to die?" one daring querist ventured further.

"Some time," said the doctor.

But though he assumed a right to combat thus the outer world, no one was
gentler with a sick man or with those about him in their grief. To the
latter he would speak; but he used to say he drew his line at second
cousins.

Into his hands and the true old parson's fell the stranger's confidence,
if confidence it were. He may have died solitary and unexplained; but no
matter what he said, his story was safe. In a week he was carried out
for burial; and so solemn was the parson's manner as he spoke a brief
service over him, so thrilling his enunciation of the words "our
brother," that we dared not even ask what else he should be called. And
we never knew. The headstone, set up by the parson, bore the words
"Peccator Maximus." For a long time we thought they made the stranger's
name, and judged that he must have been a foreigner; but a new
schoolmistress taught us otherwise. It was Latin, she said, and it meant
"the chiefest among sinners." When that report flew round, the parson
got wind of it, and then, in the pulpit one morning, he announced that
he