emote and pitifully rustic
stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened
but listlessly--indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which he
was scattering among the divines before him.

The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation. After
each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded rows of
clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this brother had
received, the reward justly given to this other, the favoritism by which
a third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was,
stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon the rows of
blackcoated humanity spread before them. The ministers returned this
fixed and perfunctory gaze with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the
emotions which each new name stirred somewhere among them. The Bishop
droned on laboriously, mispronouncing words and repeating himself as if
he were reading a catalogue of unfamiliar seeds.

"First church of Tecumseh--Brother Abram G. Tisdale!"

There was no doubt about it! These were actually the words that had been
uttered. After all this outlay, all this lavish hospitality, all this
sacrifice of time and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
from the grab-bag nothing better than--a Tisdale!

A hum of outraged astonishment--half groan, half wrathful snort bounded
along from pew to pew throughout the body of the church. An echo of it
reached the Bishop, and so confused him that he haltingly repeated the
obnoxious line. Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.

Could anything be worse? This Brother Tisdale was past fifty--a
spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like head and
vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the other of his hands continually
fumbling his bony jaw. He had been withdrawn from routine service for a
number of years, doing a little insurance canvassing on his own account,
and also travelling for the Book Concern. Now that he wished to return
to parochial work, the richest prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was
given to him--to him who had never been asked to preach at a Conference,
and whose archaic nasal singing of "Greenland's Icy Mountains" had made
even the Licensed Exhorters grin! It was too intolerably dreadful to
think of!

An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was the Bishop's cousin
ran round from pew to pew. This did