my dear friends.' That was the last Jeduthun saw of him; for
in a few minutes more the ship struck, and then it was every man for
himself. Laws! Jeduthun says there couldn't nobody have stood beatin'
agin them rocks, unless they was all leather and inger-rubber like him.
Why, he says the waves would take strong men and jest crush 'em against
the rocks like smashin' a pie-plate!"

Here Mary's paleness became livid; she made a hasty motion to rise from
the table, and Solomon trod on the foot of the narrator.

"You seem to forget that friends and relations has feelin's," he said,
as Mary hastily went into her own room.

Amaziah, suddenly awakened to the fact that he had been trespassing, sat
with mouth half open and a stupefied look of perplexity on his face for
a moment, and then, rising hastily, said, "Well, Sol, I guess I'll go
an' yoke up the steers."

At eight o'clock all the morning toils were over, the wide kitchen cool
and still, and the one-horse wagon standing at the door, into which
climbed Mary, her mother, and the Doctor; for, though invested with no
spiritual authority, and charged with no ritual or form for hours of
affliction, the religion of New England always expects her minister as a
first visitor in every house of mourning.

The ride was a sorrowful and silent one. The Doctor, propped upon his
cane, seemed to reflect deeply.

"Have you been at all conversant with the exercises of our young
friend's mind on the subject of religion?" he asked.

Mrs. Scudder did not at first reply. The remembrance of James's last
letter flashed over her mind, and she felt the vibration of the frail
child beside her, in whom every nerve was quivering. After a moment, she
said,--"It does not become us to judge the spiritual state of any one.
James's mind was in an unsettled way when he left; but who can say what
wonders may have been effected by divine grace since then?"

This conversation fell on the soul of Mary like the sound of clods
falling on a coffin to the ear of one buried alive;--she heard it with a
dull, smothering sense of suffocation. _That_ question to be
raised?--and about one, too, for whom she could have given her own soul?
At this moment she felt how idle is the mere hope or promise of personal
salvation made to one who has passed beyond the life of self, and struck
deep the roots of his existence in others. She did not utter a
word;--how could she? A doubt,--the faintest shadow of a doubt,--in such