useholds.

He leaned forward in the old pulpit, his shapely, well-kept hand hanging
over the edge in one of his most characteristic gestures; and the autumn
sunlight, falling through the plain glass windows, shone on his temples.
Immediately below him, in a front pew, sat his mother, a dried little
old woman, with beady black eyes and a pointed chin, which jutted out
from between the stiff taffeta strings of her poke bonnet. She gazed
upward, clasping her Prayer-book in her black woollen gloves, which were
darned in the fingers; and though she appeared to listen attentively to
the sermon, she was wondering all the time if the coloured servant at
home would remember to baste the roast pig she had left in the oven.
To-day was the Reverend Orlando's birthday, and the speckled pig she had
fattened throughout the summer, lay now, with an apple in his mouth, on
the trencher. She had invited Molly to dine with them rather against
her wishes, for she harboured a secret fear that the girl was trying
to marry the rector. Besides, as she said to herself, with her eyes
on Orlando's hand, how on earth could he do full justice to the pig if
there was a pretty parishioner to distract his attention?

In the pew next to Mrs. Mullen sat old Adam Doolittle, his hand behind
his left ear, his withered old lips moving as if he were repeating the
words of the sermon. From time to time he shook his head as though he
disagreed with a sentence, and then his lips worked more rapidly, and
an obstinate, argumentative look appeared in his face. Mentally he was
conducting a theological dispute with the preacher in which the younger
man suffered always a crushing rhetorical defeat. Behind him sat the
miller and Blossom Revercomb, who threw an occasional anxious glance at
the empty seat beside Mrs. Gay and Kesiah; and behind them Judy Hatch
raised her plain, enraptured face to the pulpit, where the rector had
shaken out an immaculately ironed handkerchief and wiped his brow.
She knew who had ironed that handkerchief on Wednesday, which was Mrs.
Mullen's washing day, and her heart rejoiced as she remembered the care
with which she had folded the creases.

It made no difference, said Mr. Mullen, replacing the handkerchief
somewhere under his white surplice, whether a woman was ugly or
beautiful, since they possessed Scriptural authority for the statement
that beauty was vain, and no God-fearing man would rank loveliness of
face or form above the capaci