Hillsboro People

een Mountains; but when it came it had a savor of enchantment unknown to milder regions. The first day of spring was no uncertain date in Hillsboro, then as now. One m

s, whose isolation had preserved intact the rigidity of faith which had begun to soften somewhat in other parts of New England, there was no one who openly saluted the miracle of resurrec

he flock committed to his charge by an angry and a jealous God, and he had felt deep within him a damnable stirring of sensual pleasure as the perfumed breath of the new season had blown across his face. If the anointed of the Lord had thus yielded to the insidious wiles of unregenerate natur

f the garden, where the peas were just thrusting green bowed heads through the crumbling earth. He knelt above them breathless, he looked up to the maple-twigs, over which a faint reddish bloom had been cast in the night, beyond to the lower slopes of the mountai

the door and call

went toward the house. A shriveling

eareth his father's instructions;

you, f

r in the garden an

t tell you

n you do no

say I do

answ

ather-I know no words-I was-it is so warm-the

tion even now hangs in the balance, for whose soul I wrestle every night in prayer that you may be brought to the conviction of sin,

p wretchedly at his father. When the minister turned away

himself up to the pitch of storming fervor which made his sermons so notable, and his wife and son cowered under the unspoken emanations of the passion which

e forest, lying drowsily in the spring sunshine, was like balm to him. He loitered along, free from observation, his eyes shining. A fat, old negro woman sat on a doorstep in the sun, the only other person not in meeting. She was a worn-out slave, from a Connecticut seaport, who had been thrown in for good measure in a sharp bargain driven by the le

with which one of the tiny creatures scratched the ground with his ineffectual little feet, cocking his eye upon the spot afterward as if to estimate the amount of progress made, the boy laughed out loud. He started at the sound and glanced around him hurriedly, moving on to the meeting-house from which there now burst forth a har