By day, even, it was scarcely different. Kinnicutt was hibernating. Each household had drawn into its shell. And the huge drifts, lying defiant against the fences in the short, ineffectual winter sunlight, held out little hope of reanimation. Aunt Faith, in her pumpkin hood, and Rob Roy cloak, and carpet moccasins, came over once in two or three days, and even occasionally stayed to tea, and helped make up a rubber of whist for Mr. Gartney's amusement; but, beyond this, they had no social excitement.
January brought a thaw; and, still further to break the monotony, there arose a stir and an anxiety in the parish.
Good Mr. Holland, its minister of thirty years, whose health had been failing for many months, was at last compelled to relinquish the duties of his pulpit for a time; and a supply was sought with the ultimate probability of a succession. A new minister came to preach, who was to fill the pastor's place for the ensuing three months. On his first Sunday among them, Faith heard a wonderful sermon.
I indicate thus, not the oratory, nor the rhetoric; but the sermon, of which these were the mere vehicle—the word of truth itself—which was spoken, seemingly, to her very thought.
So also, as certainly, to the long life-thought of one other. Glory McWhirk sat in Miss Henderson's corner pew, and drank it in, as a soul athirst.
A man of middle age, one might have said, at first sight—there was, here and there, a silver gleam in the dark hair and beard; yet a fire and earnestness of youth in the deep, beautiful eye, and a look in the face as of life's first flush and glow not lost, but rather merged in broader light, still climbing to its culmination, belied these tokens, and made it as if a white frost had fallen in June—rising up before the crowded village congregation, looked round upon the upturned faces, as One had looked before who brought the bread of Life to men's eager asking; and uttered the selfsame simple words.
It was a certain pause and emphasis he made—a slight new rendering of punctuation—that sent home the force of those words to the people who heard them, as if it had been for the first time, and fresh from the lips of the Great Teacher.
"'Blessed are the poor: in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'
"Herein Christ spoke, not to a class, only, but to the world! A world of souls, wrestling with the poverty of life!