him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country
people--would have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the
village had not been so much older. A man over ninety is a great comfort
to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme
outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy
must get by him before he can come near their camp. Dr. Hurlbut, at
ninety-two, made Priest Pemberton seem comparatively little advanced; but
the college catalogue showed that he must be seventy-five years old, if,
as we may suppose, he was twenty at the time of his graduation.

He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of his
flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging his serene
and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the measured dignity
of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff, he was an imposing
personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the occasion demanded it.
His creed was of the sternest: he was looked up to as a bulwark against
all the laxities which threatened New England theology. But it was a
creed rather of the study and of the pulpit than of every-day application
among his neighbors. He dealt too much in the lofty abstractions which
had always such fascinations for the higher class of New England divines,
to busy himself as much as he might have done with the spiritual
condition of individuals. He had also a good deal in him of what he used
to call the Old Man, which, as he confessed, he had never succeeded in
putting off,--meaning thereby certain qualities belonging to humanity, as
much as the natural gifts of the dumb creatures belong to them, and
tending to make a man beloved by his weak and erring fellow-mortals.

In the olden time he would have lived and died king of his parish,
monarch, by Divine right, as the noblest, grandest, wisest of all that
made up the little nation within hearing of his meeting-house bell. But