e list of ministerial appointments for the coming year.
This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow,
near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently rubbed the
glasses of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose
with annoying deliberation, was now silently rehearsing his task to
himself--the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and
restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.

Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a great many
of these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part
elderly, brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many
others, not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there
almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the
steps leading down from this platform. A score of their fellows sat
facing the audience, on chairs tightly wedged into the space railed off
round the pulpit; and then came five or six rows of pews, stretching
across the whole breadth of the church, and almost solidly filled with
preachers of the Word.

There were very old men among these--bent and decrepit veterans who
had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained by elders who remembered
Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. They sat now in front places,
leaning forward with trembling and misshapen hands behind their hairy
ears, waiting to hear their names read out on the superannuated list, it
might be for the last time.

The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good to the eyes,
conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely
people had been served by a fervent and devoted clergy--by preachers
who lacked in learning and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives
without dream of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing
toil of itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. These
pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household
implements, coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary
years of journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there
shone upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. Reverend
survivors of the heroic times, their very presence there--sitting
meekly at the altar-rail to hear again the published record of their
uselessness and of their dependence upon church charity--was in the
nature of a benediction.

The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs were