The pulpit, however, was his especial sphere. There he reigned
supreme; there he exhorted, rebuked, and advised, as in the days of
Mather. There he inspired that profound reverence of which he was so
proud, and which induced the matrons of the village, when he was
coming to make a visit, to bedizen the children in their Sunday suits,
to parade the best teapot, and to offer the most capacious chair. In
the pulpit he delivered everything with the pompous cadence of the
elder New England clergy, and a sly joke is told at the expense of his
even temper, that on one occasion, when loftily reading the hymn, he
encountered a blot upon the page quite obliterating the word; but
without losing the cadence, although in a very vindictive tone at the
truant word, or the culprit who erased it, he finished the reading as
follows:

"He sits upon His throne above,
Attending angels bless,
While Justice, Mercy, Truth--and another word
which is blotted out--
Compose His princely dress."

We linger around the Old Manse and its occupants as fondly as
Hawthorne, but no more fondly than all who have been once within the
influence of its spell. There glimmer in my memory a few hazy days, of
a tranquil and half-pensive character, which I am conscious were
passed in and around the house, and their pensiveness I know to be
only that touch of twilight which inhered in the house and all its
associations. Beside the few chance visitors I have named there were
city friends occasionally, figures quite unknown to the village, who
came preceded by the steam-shriek of the locomotive, were dropped at