him to such as were prepared to believe it. Not all were prepared; many
denied; the most doubted; but those who accepted that meaning of the
inspired words were of the principal people, respected for their higher
intelligence and their greater wealth.

He had come to the Temple with Peter Hingston and he went with him from
it. Hingston's quarter section of the richest farmland in the bottom
bordered his mill privilege, with barns and corncribs and tobacco sheds,
and his brick house behind the mill was the largest and finest dwelling in
the place. His flocks and herds abounded; his state was patriarchal; and
in the neighborhood which loved and honored him, for some favor and
kindness done nearly every man there: for money when the crops failed; for
the storage of their wheat and corn in the deep bins of his mill when the
yield was too great for their barns; for the use of his sheds in drying
their tobacco before their own were ready. His growing sons and daughters,
until they were grown men and women, obeyed his counsel as they had obeyed
his will while children. But he was severe with no one; since his wife had
died his natural gentleness was his manner as it had always been his make,
and it tempered the piety, which in many was forbidding and compelling, to
a wistful kindness. His faith admitted no misgiving, for himself, but his
toleration of doubts and differences in others extended to the worst of
skeptics. He believed that revelation had never ceased; he was of those
who looked for a sign, because if God had ever given Himself in communion
with His creatures it was not reasonable that he should afterwards always
withhold Himself. A friendly humor looked from his dull eyes, and, in
never quite coming to a formulated joke, stayed his utterance as if he
were hopeful of some such event in time. He stood large in bulk as well as
height, and drew his breath in slow, audible respirations.

The first people of the community tacitly recognized him as the first man