faintly warm with the ghost of a flush and the blue veins swell from
the throbbing of a heart stirred by a spiritual vision, that the
observer gets a hint of the realities of such a life.

Mrs. Ashe was a type of the saintly woman that the spirit of Puritanism
bred in rural New England. Such women are the living embodiment of the
power which has inspired whatever is best in the nation; the power
which has been a living force amid the worldliness, the materialism,
the crudity that have threatened to overwhelm the people of this yet
young land, so prematurely old. In her face was a look of high
unworldliness that marks the mystic, the inheritance from ancestors
bred in a faith impossible without mysticism in the very fibres of the
race. The heroic self-denial, the persistent belief, the noble fidelity
to the ideal which is the salvation of a nation, shine in such a
countenance, and make real the high deeds of a past generation the
narrowness of whose creeds too often blinds us to-day to the greatness
of their character.

She smiled a little on hearing the object of her son's visit.

"I am glad to see you on any terms," she observed, "but I cannot say
that I think your coming very wise."

"But, mother," he urged, "don't you see that it is a matter of so much
importance that we ought not to neglect any chance?"

"My dear boy," questioned she, "do you really think that it is of so
much importance who is bishop?"

"It is of the greatest possible importance," he returned earnestly. "Of