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AT nine next morning, prayers and breakfast being
dispatched, — during which Parson Brummem
had determined to leave Reuben to the sting
of his conscience, — the master appears in the school-room
with his wristbands turned up, and his ferule
in hand, to enforce judgment upon the culprit. It
had been a frosty night, and the cool October air
had not tempted the boys to any wide movement
out of doors, so that no occupant of the parsonage
had as yet detected the draggled white banner that
hung from the prison-window.

Through Keziah, the parson gave orders for Master
Johns to report himself at once in the school-room.
The maid returned presently, clattering down the
stairs in a great fright, —

“Reuben 's gone, sir!”

“Gone?” says the tall master, astounded. He represses
a wriggle of healthful satisfaction on the part
of his pupils by a significant lift of his ferule, then
moves ponderously up the stairs for a personal visit
to the chamber of the culprit. The maid had given

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true report; there was no one there. Never had he
been met with such barefaced rebellion. Truants,
indeed, there had been in days gone by; but that
a pupil under discipline should have tied together
Mistress Brummem's linen and left it draggling in
this way, in the sight of every passer-by, was an
affront to his authority which he had not deemed
possible.

An hour thereafter, and he had assigned the morning's
task to the boys (which he had ventured to
lengthen by a third, in view — as he said, with a
grim humor — of their extremely cheerful spirits);
established Mistress Brummem in temporary charge,
and was driving his white-faced nag down the road
which led toward Ashfield. The frosted pools
crackled under the wheels of the old chaise; the
heaving horse wheezed as the stern parson gave his
loins a thwack with the slackened reins, and urged
him down the turnpike which led away through the
ill-kept fields, from the rambling, slatternly town.
Stone walls that had borne the upheaval of twenty
winters reeled beside the way. Broad scars of ocherous
earth, from which the turnpike-menders had dug
material to patch the wheel-track, showed ooze of
yellow mud with honeycombs of ice rimming their
edges, and supporting a thin film of sod made up of
lichens and the roots of five-fingers. Raw, shapeless

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stones, and bald, gray rocks, only half unearthed,
cumbered the road; while bunches of dwarfed birches,
browsed by straying cattle, added to the repulsiveness
of the scene. Nor were the inclosed lands scarcely
more inviting. Lean shocks of corn that had swayed
under the autumn winds stretched at long intervals
across fields of thin stubble; a few half-ripened
pumpkins, hanging yet to the seared vines, — whose
leaves had long since been shriveled by the frost,—
showed their shining green faces on the dank
soil. In other fields, overrun with a great shaggy
growth of rag-weed, some of the parson's flock —
father and blue-nosed boys — were lifting poor crops
of “bile-whites” or “merinos.” From time to time,
a tall house jutted upon the road, with unctuous
pig-sty under the lee of the garden-fence and wood-pile
sprawling into the highway, where the parson
would rein up his nag, and make inquiry after the
truant Reuben.

A half-dozen of these stops and inquiries proved
wholly vain; yet the sturdy parson urged his poor,
heaving nag forward, until he had come to the little
gate-house which thrust itself quite across the high
road at some six miles' distance from Bolton Church.
No stray boy had passed that day. Thereupon the
parson turned, and, after retracing his way for two
miles or more, struck into a cross-road which led

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westward. There were the same fruitless inquiries
here at the scattered houses, and when he came at
length upon the great river-road along which the
boy had passed at the first dawn, there was no one
who could tell any thing of him; and by noon the
parson reëntered the village, disconsolate and hungry.
He was by no means a vindictive man, and could
very likely have forgiven Reuben the blow he had
struck. He had no conception of the hidden causes
which had wrought in the lad such burst of anger.
He conceived only that Satan had taken hold of him,
and he had strong faith in the efficacy of the rod
for driving Satan out.

After dinner he administered a sharp lecture to
his pupils, admonishing them of the evils of disobedience,
and warning them that “God sometimes left
bad boys to their own evil courses, and to run
like the herd of swine into which the unclean
spirits entered, — of which account might be found
in Mark v. 13, — down a steep place, and be
choked.”

The parson still had hope that Reuben might appear
at evening; and he forecast a good turn which
he would make, in such event, upon the parable of
the Prodigal Son (with the omission, however, of the
fatted calf). But the prodigal did not return. Next
day there was the same hope, but fainter. Still, the

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prodigal Reuben did not return. Whereupon the
parson thought it his duty to write to Brother Johns,
advising him of the escape of Reuben, — “he having
stolen away in the night, tying together and much
draggling Mrs. Brummem's pair of company sheets,
(no other being out of wash,) and myself following
after vainly, the best portion of a day, much perturbed
in spirit, in my chaise. I duly instructed my parishioners
to report him, if found, which has not been
the case. I trust that in the paternal home, if he
has made his way thither, he may be taught to open
his `ear to discipline,' and `return from iniquity.'
Job xxxvi. 10.”

The good parson was a type of not a few retired
country ministers in New England forty years ago:
a heavy-minded, right-meaning man; utterly inaccessible
to any of the graces of life; no bird ever sang
in his ear; no flower ever bloomed for his eye; a
man to whom life was only a serious spiritual toil,
and all human joys a vanity to be spurned; preaching
tediously long sermons, and counting the fatigue
of the listeners a fitting oblation to spiritual truth;
staggering through life with a great burden of theologies
on his back, which it was his constant struggle
to pack into smaller and smaller compass, — not so
much, we fear, for the relief of others as of himself.
Let us hope that the burden — like that of Christian

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in the “Pilgrim's Progress” — slipped away before
he entered the Celestial Presence, and left him free
to enjoy and admire, more than he found time to
do on earth, the beauty of that blessed angel in the
higher courts whose name is Charity.

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