"This man lives above the world," said the people; and if some of them did not give very cordial assent to these latter views, they smothered their dissent by a lofty expression of admiration; they felt it a duty to give them open acceptance, to venerate the speaker the more by reason of their utterance. And yet their limited acceptance diffused a certain chill, very likely, over their religious meditations. But it was a chill which unfortunately they counted it good to entertain,—a rigor of faith that must needs be borne. It is doubtful, indeed, if they did not make a merit of their placid intellectual admission of such beliefs as most violated the natural sensibilities of the heart. They were so sure that affectionate instincts were by nature wrong in their tendencies, so eager to cumulate evidences of the original depravity, that, when their parson propounded a theory that gave a shock to their natural affections, they submitted with a kind of heroic pride, however much their hearts might make silent protest, and the grounds of such a protest they felt a cringing unwillingness to investigate. There was a determined shackling of all the passional nature. What wonder that religion took a harsh aspect? As if intellectual adhesion to theological formulas were to pave our way to a knowledge of the Infinite!—as if our sensibilities were to be outraged in the march to Heaven!—as if all the emotional nature were to be clipped away by the shears of the doctors, leaving only the metaphysic ghost of a soul to enter upon the joys of Paradise!

Within eight months after his loss, Mr. Johns thought of Rachel only as a gift that God had bestowed to try him, and had taken away to work in him a humiliation of the heart. More severely than ever he wrestled with the dogmas of his chosen divines, harnessed them to his purposes as preacher, and wrought on with a zeal that knew no abatement and no rest.

In the spring of 1825 Mr. Johns was invited by Governor Wolcott to preach the Election Sermon before the Legislature convened at Hartford: an honorable duty, and one which he was abundantly competent to fulfil. The "Hartford Courant" of that date said,—"A large auditory was collected last week to listen to the Election Sermon by Mr. Johns, minister of Ashfield. It was a sound, orthodox, and interesting discourse, and won the undivided attention of all the listeners. We have not recently listened to a sermon more able or eloquent."

In that day even country editors were church-goers and God-fearing men.

XIII.

In the latter part of the summer of 1826,—a reasonable time having now elapsed since the death of poor Rachel,—the gossips of Ashfield began to discuss the lonely condition of their pastor, in connection with any desirable or feasible amendment of it. The sin of such gossip—if it be a sin—is one that all the preaching in the world will never extirpate from country towns, where the range of talk is by the necessity of the case exceedingly limited. In the city, curiosity has an omnivorous maw by reason of position, and finds such variety to feed upon that it is rarely—except in the case of great political or public scandal—personal in its attentions; and what we too freely reckon a perverted and impertinent country taste is but an ordinary appetite of humanity, which, by the limitation of its feeding-ground, seems to attach itself perversely to private relations.

There were some invidious persons in the town who had remarked that Miss Almira Tourtelot had brought quite a new fervor to her devotional exercises in the parish within the last year, as well as a new set of ribbons to her hat; and two maiden ladies opposite, of distinguished pretensions and long experience of life, had observed that the young Reuben, on his passage back and forth from the Elderkins, had sometimes been decoyed within the Tourtelot yard, and presented by the admiring Dame Tourtelot with fresh doughnuts. The elderly maiden ladies were perhaps uncharitable in their conclusions; yet it is altogether probable that the Deacon and his wife may have considered, in the intimacy of their fireside talk, the possibility of some time claiming the minister as a son-in-law. Questions like this are discussed in a great many families even now.

Dame Tourtelot had crowned with success all her schemes in life, save one. Almira, her daughter, now verging upon her thirty-second year, had long been upon the anxious-seat as regarded matrimony; and with a sentimental turn that incited much reading of Cowper and Montgomery and (if it must be told) "Thaddeus of Warsaw," the poor girl united a sickly, in-door look, and a peaked countenance, which had not attracted wooers. The wonderful executive capacity of the mother had unfortunately debarred her from any active interest in the household; and though the Tourtelots had actually been at the expense of providing a piano for Almira, (the only one in Ashfield,)—upon which the poor girl thrummed, thinking of "Thaddeus," and, we trust, of better things,—this had not won a roseate hue to her face, or quickened in any perceptible degree the alacrity of her admirers.

Upon a certain night of later October, after Almira has retired, and when the Tourtelots are seated by the little fire, which the autumn chills have rendered necessary, and into the embers of which the Deacon has cautiously thrust the leg of one of the fire-dogs, preparatory to a modest mug of flip, (with which, by his wife's permission, he occasionally indulges himself,) the good dame calls out to her husband, who is dozing in his chair,—

"Tourtelot!"