ironmonger, deacon, presiding at prayer-meetings, strict Sabbatarian,
and believer in eternal punishments; while a third was set forth by
"Guffy," whose real name was unknown, who got drunk, unloaded barges,
assisted at the municipal elections, and was never once seen inside a
place of worship. These patterns had existed amongst us from the
dimmest antiquity, and were accepted as part of the eternal order of
things; so much so, that the deacon, although he professed to be sure
that nobody who had not been converted would escape the fire--and the
wine-merchant certainly had not been converted--was very far from
admitting to himself that the wine-merchant ought to be converted, or
that it would be proper to try and convert him. I doubt, indeed,
whether our congregation would have been happy, or would have thought
any the better of him, if he had left the church. Such an event,
however, could no more come within the reach of our vision than a
reversal of the current of our river. It would have broken up our
foundations and party-walls, and would have been considered as
ominous, and anything but a subject for thankfulness. But Miss Leroy
was not the wine-merchant, nor the ironmonger, nor Guffy, and even
now I cannot trace the hidden centre of union from which sprang so
much that was apparently irreconcilable. She was a person whom
nobody could have created in writing a novel, because she was so
inconsistent. As I have said before, she studied Thomas a Kempis,
and her little French Bible was brown with constant use. But then
she read much fiction in which there were scenes which would have
made our hair stand on end. The only thing she constantly abhorred
in books was what was dull and opaque. Yet, as we shall see
presently, her dislike to dulness, once at least in her life, notably
failed her. She was not Catholic, and professed herself Protestant,
but such a Protestantism! She had no sceptical doubts. She believed
implicitly that the Bible was the Word of God, and that everything in