,--"a clever man,
and a forehanded man, very. It's a rich parish, son-in-law; they ought
to do well by you."

"I don't like," says Mr. Johns, "to look at what may become my spiritual
duty in that light."

"I wouldn't," returned Mr. Handby; "but when you are as old as I am,
son-in-law, you'll know that we have to keep a kind of side-look upon
the good things of this world,--else we shouldn't be placed in it."

"_He_ heareth the young ravens when they cry," said the minister,
gravely.

"Just it," says Mr. Handby; "but I don't want your young ravens to be
crying."

At which Rachel, with the slightest possible suffusion of color, and a
pretty affectation of horror, said,--

"Now, papa!"

There was an interuption here, and the conclave broke up; but Rachel,
stepping briskly to the place she loved so well, beside the minister,
said, softly,--

"I hope you'll go, Benjamin; and do, please, preach that beautiful
sermon on Revelations."

IV.

Thirty or forty years ago there lay scattered about over Southern New
England a great many quiet inland towns, numbering from a thousand to
two or three thousand inhabitants, which boasted a little old-fashioned
"society" of their own,--which had their important men who were heirs to
some snug country property, and their gambrel-roofed houses odorous with
traditions of old-time visits by some worthies of the Colonial period,
or of the Revolution. The good, prim dames, in starched caps and
spectacles, who presided over such houses, were proud of their tidy
parlors,--of their old India china,--of their beds of thyme and sage in
the garden,--of their big Family Bible with brazen clasps,--and, most
times, of their minister.

One Orthodox Congregational Society extended its benignant patronage
over all the people of such town; or, if a stray Episcopalian or
Seven-Day Baptist were here and there living under the wing of the
parish, they were regarded with a serene and stately gravity, as
necessary exceptions to the law of Divine Providence,--like scattered
instances of red hair or of bow-legs in otherwise well-favored families.

There were no wires stretching over the country to shock the nerves of
the good gossips with the thought that their neighbors knew more than
they. There were no heathenisms of the cities, no tenpins, no travelling
circus, no progressive young men of heretical tendencies. Such towns
were as quiet as a sheepfold. Sauntering down their broad central
street