sent to excuse himself yesterday, being to preach a funeral sermon."

The cause of so much amazement may appear sufficiently slight. Mr.
Hooper, a gentlemanly person of about thirty, though still a bachelor,
was dressed with due clerical neatness, as if a careful wife had
starched his band and brushed the weekly dust from his Sunday's garb.
There was but one thing remarkable in his appearance. Swathed about
his forehead and hanging down over his face, so low as to be shaken by
his breath, Mr. Hooper had on a black veil. On a nearer view it seemed
to consist of two folds of crape, which entirely concealed his
features except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his
sight further than to give a darkened aspect to all living and
inanimate things. With this gloomy shade before him good Mr. Hooper
walked onward at a slow and quiet pace, stooping somewhat and looking
on the ground, as is customary with abstracted men, yet nodding kindly
to those of his parishioners who still waited on the meeting-house
steps. But so wonder-struck were they that his greeting hardly met
with a return.

"I can't really feel as if good Mr. Hooper's face was behind that
piece of crape," said the sexton.

"I don't like it," muttered an old woman as she hobbled into the
meeting-house. "He has changed himself into something awful only by
hiding his face."

"Our parson has gone mad!" cried Goodman Gray, following him across
the threshold.

A rumor of some unaccountable phenomenon had preceded Mr. Hooper into