sted on doing
everything himself. He rang the bell, ushered the congregation to their
seats, read the service, recited the Quadrupeds' Creed, led the
choir, gave out as many announcements as he could devise, took up the
collection, and at the close skipped out through the vestry and was
ready and beaming in the porch before the nimblest worshipper had
reached the door. On his first Sunday, indeed, he carried enthusiasm
rather too far: in an innocent eagerness to prolong the service as much
as possible, and being too excited to realize quite what he was doing,
he went through the complete list of supplications for all possible
occasions. The congregation were startled to find themselves praying
simultaneously both for rain and for fair weather.

In a cupboard in the vestry-room he had found an old surplice hanging;
he took it down, tried it on before the mirror, and wistfully put it
back. To this symbolic vestment his mind returned as he sat solitary
under the pine-trees, looking down upon the valley of home. It was the
season of goldenrod and aster on the hillsides: a hot swooning silence
lay upon the late afternoon. The weight and closeness of the air had
struck even the insects dumb. Under the pines, generally so murmurous,
there was something almost gruesome in the blank stillness: a suspension
so absolute that the ears felt dull and sealed. He tried, involuntarily,
to listen more clearly, to know if this uncanny hush were really so.
There was a sense of being imprisoned, but only most delicately, in a
spell, which some sudden cracking might disrupt.

The surplice tempted him strongly, for it suggested the sermon he felt
impelled to deliver, against the Bishop's orders. For the beautiful
chapel in the piny glade was, somehow, false: or, at any rate, false for
him. The architect had made it a dainty poem in stone and polished wood,
but somehow God had evaded the neat little trap. Moreover, the God
his well-bred congregation worshipped, the old traditionally imagined
snow-white St. Bernard with radiant jowls of tenderness, shining dewlaps
of love; paternal, omnipotent, calm--this deity, though sublime in its
way, was too plainly an extension of their own desires. His prominent
parishioners--Mr. Dobermann-Pinscher, Mrs. Griffon, Mrs. Retriever;
even the delightful Mr. Airedale himself--was it not likely that they
esteemed a deity everlastingly forgiving because they themselves felt
need of forgiveness? He had been deep