punctilious decorum, those inquiries in regard to health and well-being which preface a social interview. Then, at a dignified sigh from Mrs. Katy, he advanced to the table, and all following his example, stood, while, with one hand uplifted, he went through a devotional exercise which, for length, more resembled a prayer than a grace,—after which the company were seated.

‘Well, Doctor,’ said Mr. Brown, who, as a householder of substance, felt a conscious right to be first in open conversation with the minister, ‘people are beginning to make a noise about your views. I was talking with Deacon Timmins the other day down on the wharf, and he said Dr. Stiles said that it was entirely new doctrine—entirely so,—and for his part he wanted the good old ways.’

‘They say so, do they?’ said the Doctor, kindling up from an abstraction into which he seemed to be gradually subsiding. ‘Well, let them. I had rather publish new divinity than any[38] other, and the more of it the better,—if it be but true. I should think it hardly worth while to write, if I had nothing new to say.’

[38]

‘Well,’ said Deacon Twitchel,—his meek face flushing with awe of his minister—‘Doctor, there’s all sorts of things said about you. Now the other day I was at the mill with a load of corn, and while I was a-waitin’, Amariah Wadsworth come along with his’n; and so while we were waitin’, he says to me, “Why, they say your minister is gettin’ to be an Arminian;” and he went on a-tellin’ how old Ma’am Badger told him that you interpreted some parts of Paul’s Epistles clear on the Arminian side. You know Ma’am Badger’s a master-hand at doctrines, and she’s ’most an uncommon Calvinist.’

‘That does not frighten me at all,’ said the sturdy Doctor. ‘Supposing I do interpret some texts like the Arminians. Can’t Arminians have anything right about them? Who wouldn’t rather go with the Arminians when they are right, than with the Calvinists when they are wrong?’

‘That’s it,—you’ve hit it, Doctor,’ said Simeon Brown. ‘That’s what I always say. I say, ‘Don’t he prove it? and how are you going to answer him?’ That gravels ’em.’

‘Well,’ said Deacon Twitchel, ‘Brother Seth—you know Brother Seth,—he says you deny depravity. He’s all for imputation of Adam’s sin, you know; and I have long talks with Seth about it, every time he comes to see me; and he says, that if we did not sin in Adam, it’s givin’ up the whole ground altogether; and then he insists you’re clean wrong 

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