with the utmost solemnity the moderator admonished the members, saying:

"Let each brother now come to the altar and kneeling there, in token of humble submission to our Heavenly Father's will, vote according to the dictation of his conscience,-'Yes' or 'No,'-upon the question: 'Shall the candidate be chosen?' The white balls elect, the black reject; two black balls will bar the brother from entering the ministry of this church. Be careful how you vote."

No black balls were cast; and a month later the ordination ceremonies were held, and Clark began to work as temporary supply for a church in need of a pastor. There he continued for nearly one year, and his preaching and services were quite satisfactory; he declined to accept a call to become the regular pastor, because he had a notion that he ought to do some good and gain experience in home missionary work while he was young and foot-loose. That thought was closely allied to another, which Dr. Mason approved, involving postponement of his marriage to Matilda until he should be settled as the regular pastor of a church.

Dr. Mason easily convinced himself that sincere regard for the welfare of his daughter was his governing motive in that matter. But, in addition to that, he knew that Matilda could not be taken from the active working force of his own church without leaving a vacancy that could not be filled; and on that account he was reluctant to let her go away.

CHAPTER III

A SEA CAPTAIN'S DAUGHTER

In the year 1847 the ship Madonna,—of Bath, Maine, Captain Giles,-sailed on a voyage from New York to China and return. The Captain,being a part owner of the ship and having an extraordinary record of more than thirty years' service as a ship master, without any mishap to any vessel in his charge,—was accorded the unusual privilege of taking his wife and daughter with him on that voyage. When the ship returned a year later, the daughter came back an orphan. Both her parents having died at sea, their bodies were disposed of in the usual manner by being dropped into the deep ocean.

Candace Giles, then a young woman of twentyfive, was not an extraordinary person, just a comely, clever Yankee girl. Having no near relatives, she was both lonely and independent, and being free to accept a proposal from Etienne Brosière, a Canadian sailor, who was second mate of the Madonna, she did so; and the marriage took place without unnecessary delay.

That she might not be left alone, Candace persuaded her husband to retire from his occupation

as a mariner, and they secured a tract of land, and started to make a home in a sparsely inhabited region in St. Lawrence County, near the northern boundary of New York. A settler's cabin was built, and a start made with a team, cow, pigs, poultry, and a garden; then to earn money, Brosière went to work peeling hemlock logs for tan-bark, in which employment he was accidently killed.

The widow's loneliness in her isolated home was made drearier by the unfriendliness of her nearest neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Scenter.

By other inhabitants of that region Candace was regarded as a mystery. Because of her experiences in having sailed over oceans, visited strange countries, and the sea burial of her parents, the imaginative backwoodsmen thought of her only as they would if she had been an immigrant from another planet.

Mrs. Scenter, however, was different. In times when a combination of malice, superstition, religious zeal, and suspicion might condemn a mere woman to suffer an ignominious death as a witch, she would not have hesitated to contribute one or more of those ingredients to initiate criminal proceedings against her afflicted neighbor. Mrs. Scenter was a sharp-visaged, long-nosed, gossiping, meddlesome person; her only sphere of usefulness was in the rôle of a tormentor, bent on trying the patience of those that might be made better by severe discipline; she was malignant,

and her meek, cringing husband was just smart enough to be a dangerous instrument, ready at hand for use in working out her wicked designs.

CHAPTER IV

EXPERIENCES OF A HOME MISSIONARY

THE district comprising the homes of the Scenters, Candace Brosière, and about two dozen other settlers had been seldom visited by a protestant minister, so that the rarity of the occasion, as well as the interest of some, brought them all to hear Clark preach on a Sunday in September, 1850, when he came to their district schoolhouse, pursuant to an engagement previously made. He had spent the summer of that year preaching, baptizing, and doing general missionary work along the Northern frontier. He was there ahead of time, although, to keep his appointment, he had walked since daylight that morning from Galilee,-a village sixteen miles distant.

Being weary and hungry, he was surprised at the conclusion of the forenoon service at the neglect of everybody to offer him customary hospitality. American pioneers of that period were invariably generous in hospitality to all strangers and travelers, except preachers; and it was marvelous that even a preacher should be left by all of his congregation without a door opened to receive him for sustenance and lodgment. How