they call it by the name of its opposite. A weary and rather
disappointed pilgrim, he thus comforted himself as he sat.

There a great salmon rose and fell, gleaming like a bolt of silver in
the sun! There a little waterbeetle scurried along after some invisible
prey. The blue smoke of his pipe melted in the Sabbath air. The softened
sounds of a singing congregation came across gardens and hedges to his
ear. They sang with more energy than grace, and, not for the first time,
he felt they did. Were they indeed singing to the Lord, he asked
himself, or only to the idol Custom? A silence came: the young man in
the pulpit was giving out his text, and the faces that had turned
themselves up to Walter Drake as flowers to the sun, were now all
turning to the face of him they had chosen in his stead, "to minister to
them in holy things." He took his pipe from his mouth, and sat
motionless, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

But why was he not at chapel himself? Could it be that he yielded to
temptation, actually preferring his clay pipe and the long glide of the
river, to the worship, and the hymns and the sermon? Had there not been
a time when he judged that man careless of the truth who did not go to
the chapel, and that man little better who went to the church? Yet there
he sat on a Sunday morning, the church on one side of him and the chapel
on the other, smoking his pipe! His daughter was at the chapel; she had
taken Ducky with her; the dog lay in the porch waiting for them; the cat
thought too much of herself to make friends with her master; he had
forgotten his New Testament on the study table; and now he had let his
pipe out.

He was not well, it is true, but he was well enough to have gone. Was he
too proud to be taught where he had been a teacher? or was it that the
youth in his place taught there doctrines which neither they nor their
fathers had known? It could not surely be from resentment that they had
super-annuated him in the prime of his old age, with a pared third of
his late salary, which nothing but honesty in respect to the small
moneys he owed could have prevented him from refusing!

In truth it was impossible the old minister should have any great esteem
for the flashy youth, proud of his small Latin and less Greek, a mere
unit of the hundreds whom the devil of ambition drives to preaching; one
who, whether the doctrines he taught were in the New Testament or not,
certainly never found them there, bei