howing
in his eyes. The talk became again animated. Chiefly the minister
talked, and his hostess found him most companionable.

"Let me offer you another julep," she said, after a little, noting that
his eyes had swept the empty glass with a chastened blankness. The
minister let her.

"If it would not be troubling you--really? The heat is excessive, and I
find that the mint, simple herb though it be, is strangely salutary."

The minister was a man of years and weight and worth. He possessed a
reliant simplicity that put him at once close to those he met. Of these,
by his manner, he asked all: confidence without reserve, troubles,
doubts, distresses, material or otherwise. And this manner of his
prevailed. The hearts of his people opened to him as freely as his own
opened to receive them. He was a good man and, partly by reason of this
ingenuous, unsuspicious mind, an invaluable instrument of grace.

When he had talked to Miss Caroline through the second
julep,--digressing only to marvel briefly again that the properties of
mint should so long have been Nature's own secret in Little
Arcady,--telling her his joys, his griefs, his interests, which were but
the joys and griefs and interests of his people, he wrought a spell upon
her so that she in turn became confiding.

She was an Episcopalian. Her line had been born Episcopalians since a
time whereof no data were obtainable; and this was, of course, not a
condition to meddle with in late life, even if one's mind should grow
consenting. For that matter, Miss Caroline would be frank and pretend to
no change of mind. She was an old woman and fixed. She could not at this
day free herself of a doubtless incorrect notion that the outside
churches--meaning those not Episcopal--had been intended for people
other than her own family and its offshoots. Clem had once been a
Baptist, and it was true that he was now a Methodist. He had told her
that his new religion was distinguished from the old by being "dry
religion". But these were intricacies with which a woman of Miss
Caroline's years could not be expected to entangle herself. This she
would say, however, that during her residence in Little Arcady she would
fling aside the prejudice of a lifetime and worship each Sabbath at the
minister's Methodist church.

It did not seem to the minister that she said it as might an explorer
who consents for a time to adopt the manner and customs of the tribe
among which a spirit of adve