their own skilled hands. Of course, he admitted to himself, it would
not be the same if he were to go back there again. He was conscious of
having moved along--was it, after all, an advance?--to a point where it
was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant hired man, and still
worse to encounter the bucolic confusion between the functions of
knives and forks. But in those happy days--young, zealous, himself
farm-bred--these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there
among those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast with the gaunt
surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological seminary, luxuriously
abundant and free.

It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth--nay, should
he not say of all his days?--had come to him. There he had first seen
Alice Hastings,--the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely self-reliant
girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be heard washing
the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.

How wonderful she had seemed to him then! How beautiful and
all-beneficent the miracle still appeared! Though herself the daughter
of a farmer, her presence on a visit within the borders of his remote
country charge had seemed to make everything, there a hundred times
more countrified than it had ever been before. She was fresh from the
refinements of a town seminary: she read books; it was known that
she could play upon the piano. Her clothes, her manners, her way of
speaking, the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue--not
least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding as to her father's
wealth--placed her on a glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of
the neighborhood. These honest and good-hearted creatures indeed
called ceaseless attention to her superiority by their deference and
open-mouthed admiration, and treated it as the most natural thing in the