get word to the city vestry. He tried to give directions, but his voice refused his bidding. He knew that he would be supposed to have failed to meet his appointment, perhaps to have been thwarted—a rural clergyman, old and timorous, baffled in an important professional engagement—by a little snow. He was to have taken the evening train. He was to be the guest of the vestryman who wrote that pleasant letter. He was to preach in Saint Agatha's to-morrow. He was to—

Nay,—he was not,—nay. He was to do none of these things. A sick man, mortally a sick man, past power of speech, he lay upon his carpet lounge, shivering under the pile of thin blankets and cotton comforters that had been wrapped around him, and gently faced his fate. He could not preach at Saint Agatha's. And he could not explain to the vestry. Perhaps his heart-sickness about this matter subsided a little—one likes to think so—as his disease grew upon him; but there are men who will understand me when I say that this was the greatest disappointment of his humble, holy life.

As Saturday night drew on, and the stars came out, he was heard to make such efforts to speak articulately, that one of his weeping people (an affectionate woman of a brighter wit than the rest) made out, as she bent lovingly over him, to understand so much as this:

"Lord," he said, "into thy hands I commit my s-p—"

"He commits his spirit to the Lord!" sobbed the landlady.

But the listening parishioner raised her finger to her lips.

"Lord," he said again, and this time the dullest ear in the parish could have heard the words—"Lord," he prayed, "into thy hands I commit—my supply."

Sunday morning broke upon the city as cold and clear as the sword of a rebuking angel. People on the way to the West End churches exchanged notes on the thermometer, and talked of the destitution of the poor. It was so cold that the ailing and the aged for the most part stayed at home. But the young, the ennuyé, the imitative, and the soul-sick, got themselves into their furs and carriages when the chimes rang, and the audiences were, on the whole, as comfortable and as devout as usual.

The vestryman sat nervously in his pew. He had not fully recovered from the fact that his supply had disappointed him. Having sent his coachman in vain to all the Saturday evening trains to meet his country parson, the vestryman had passed but an uneasy night.

"I had supposed the old man had principles about Sunday travel," he said to his wife, "but it seems he is coming in the morning, after all. He might at least have sent me word."

"Telegraphing in the country is—difficult, sometimes, I have heard," replied the lady, vaguely. She was a handsome, childless woman, with the haughty under lip of her class. Her husband spoke cheerily, but he was not at ease, and she did not know how to make him so.

The Sunday morning train came in from the country station forty miles back, but the old clergyman was not among its passengers. Now thoroughly alarmed, the vestryman had started for his hat and coat, when his parlor-maid brought him a message. It had been left at the door, she said, by a messenger who brooked neither delay nor question, but ordered her to tell the master of the house that the supply for Saint Agatha's was in the city, and would meet the engagement at the proper time and place. The old clergyman, the messenger added, had been suddenly stricken with a dangerous illness, and could not be expected; but his substitute would fill the pulpit for the day. The vestryman was requested to feel no concern in the matter. The preacher preferred retirement until the hour of the service, and would fulfil his duties at the church at the appointed hour.

But when the vestryman, feeling flurried despite himself, tapped at the door of the luxurious vestry-room, gracefully refurnished that winter for the rector with the sore throat who was in the south of France, he found it locked; and to his unobtrusive knock no answer came. At this uncomfortable moment the sexton tiptoed up to say that the supply had requested not to be disturbed until the service should begin. The sexton supposed that the clergyman needed extra preparation; thought that perhaps the gentleman was from the country, and—ah—unused to the audience.

"What is his name? What does he look like?" asked the chairman, with knotted brows.

"I have not seen him sir," replied the sexton, with a puzzled expression.

"How did you receive the message?"

"By a messenger who would not be delayed or questioned."

Struck by the repetition of this phrase, the chairman asked again:

"But what did the messenger look like?" The sexton shook his head.

"I cannot tell you, sir. He was a mere messenger. I paid no attention to him."

"Very well," said the church officer, turning away discontentedly. "It must be all right. I have implicit confidence in the man whose chosen substitute this is."

With this he ceased to try to intrude himself upon the stranger, but went down to his pew, and sat beside his wife in uneasy silence.

The chimes sang and sank, and sang again:

Holy, holy, holy—

The air was so clear that the sound rang twice the usual distance through the snowlit, sunlit air; and the sick and the old at home listened to the bells with a sudden stirring at their feeble hearts, and wished again that they could have gone to church. One bed-ridden woman, whose telephone connected her with Saint Agatha's, held the receiver to her sensitive ear, and smiled with the quick gratitude for trifling pleasures of the long sick, as she recognized the notes of the chime. With a leap and a thrill as if they cast their metal souls out in the act, the voices of the bells rose and swelled, and ceased and slept, and where they paused the anthem took the word up:

Holy, holy—

and carried it softly, just above the breath, with the tone which is neither a sigh, nor a cry, nor a whisper, but that harmony of all which makes of music prayer.

He must have entered on the wave of this strain; opinions differed afterwards as to this: some said one thing, some another; but it was found that most of the audience had not observed the entrance of the preacher at all. The choir ceased, and he was; and no more could be said. The church was well filled, though not over-crowded, and the decorous rustle of a fashionable audience in the interval preceding worship stirred through the house.

In the natural inattention of the moment, it was not remarkable that most of the people failed to notice the strange preacher until he was among them.

But to the church officer, whose mind was preoccupied with the supply, there was something almost startling in the manner of his approach.

The vestryman's uneasy eyes were not conscious of having slipped their guard upon the chancel for a moment; he had but turned his head politely, though a bit impatiently, to reply to some trivial remark of his wife's, when, behold, the preacher stood before him.

Afterwards it was rumored that two or three persons in the audience had not been taken by surprise in this way, but had fully observed the manner of the stranger's entrance; yet these persons, when they were sought, were difficult to find. There was one shabby woman who sat in the gallery among the "poor" seats; she was clad in rusty mourning, and had a pale and patient face, quite familiar to the audience, for she was a faithful church-goer, and had attended Saint Agatha's for many years. It came to be said, through the sexton's gossip or otherwise, that this poor woman had seen the preacher's approach quite clearly, and had been much moved thereat; but when some effort was made to find her, and to question her on this point, unexpected obstacles arose,—she was an obscure person, serving in some menial capacity for floating employers; she was accustomed to slip in and out of the church hurriedly, both late and early,—and