Upon the following Sunday the Rev. Amos Peewee, D.D., made a suitable
improvement of the melancholy event of the week. He enlarged upon the
uncertainty of life. He said that in the midst of life we are in death.
He said that we are shadows and pursue shades. He added that we are here
to-day and gone to-morrow.

During the long prayer before the sermon a violent thunder-gust swept
from the west and dashed against the old wooden church. As the Doctor
poured forth his petitions he made the most extraordinary movements with
his right hand. He waved it up and down rapidly. He opened his eyes for
an instant as if to find somebody. He seemed to be closing imaginary
windows--and so he was. It leaked out the next day at Mr. Gray's that Dr.
Peewee was telegraphing the sexton at random--for he did not know where
to look for him--to close the windows. Nobody better understood the
danger of draughts from windows, during thunder-storms, than the Doctor;
nobody knew better than he that the lightning-rod upon the spire was no
protection at all, but that the iron staples with which it was clamped
to the building would serve, in case of a bolt's striking the church, to
drive its whole force into the building. As a loud crash burst over the
village in the midst of his sermon, and showed how frightfully near the
storm was, his voice broke into a shrill quaver, as he faltered out,
"Yes, my brethren, let us be calm under all circumstances, and Death
will have no terrors."

The Rev. Amos Peewee had been settled in the village of Delafield since a
long period before the Revolution, according to the boys. But the parish
register carried the date only to the beginning of this century. He wore
a silken gown in summer, and a woolen gown in winter, and black worsted
gloves, always with the middle finger of the right-hand glove slit,