respectful posture, and glanced around frightened.

He, the doctor, rose to meet Holmes's coming footstep,--"a low
fellah, but always sure to be the upper dog in the fight, goin'
to marry the best catch," etc., etc. The others, on the
contrary, put on their hats and sauntered away into the street.

The day broadened hotly; the shadows of the Lombardy poplars
curdling up into a sluggish pool of black at their roots along
the dry gutters. The old school-master in the shade of the great
horse-chestnuts (brought from the homestead in the Piedmont
country, every one) husked corn for his wife, composing,
meanwhile, a page of his essay on the "Sirventes de Bertrand de
Born." Joel, up in the barn by himself, worked through the long
day in the old fashion,--pondering gravely (being of a religious
turn) upon a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Clinche, reported in the
"Gazette;" wherein that disciple of the meek Teacher invoked, as
he did once a week, the curses of the law upon slaveholders,
praying the Lord to sweep them immediately from the face of the
earth. Which rendering of Christian doctrine was so much
relished by Joel, and the other leading members of Mr. Clinche's
church, that they hinted to him it might be as well to continue
choosing his texts from Moses and the Prophets until the
excitement of the day was over. The New Testament
was,--well,--hardly suited for the-- emergency; did not, somehow,
chime in with the lesson of the hour. I may remark, in passing,
that this course of conduct so disgusted the High Church rector
of the parish, that he not only ignored all new devils, (as Mr.
Carlyle might have called them,) but talked as if the millennium
were un fait accompli, and he had leisure to go and hammer at the