University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.
THE QUARTERLY CONFERENCE.

IT happened, somewhere about ten years after
the bishop's son had taken up his burden, that
he, and most of the other persons who have appeared
in this story, met at at a Quarterly Conference,
in one of the districts of Southern Ohio.

And here it may be stated, that Samuel Dale had meantime
become Bishop Dale, and that his praise was in all the
churches. About many a winter fire-side, the story of his
early poverty and hardship was repeated, together with
anecdotes of his later life, to which the mothers listened,
tearful-eyed, thinking that what Samuel Dale had achieved,
might yet be achieved by other lads — perhaps by one of
their own boys — who should say!

But of the Conference. There was Brother John Lightwait,
as he was called now-a-days, an older and a sadder
man than we knew him, but having his wayward moods
yet, if we may judge by the side remarks, evincing uneasy
concern and care about him, that were passed from time to
time among the older of the brethren — as, for instance — “
What do you hear of Brother Lightwait?” “Does he give
satisfaction to his charge?” “A man of ability, but!”

It may also be stated, as indicative of a lack of perfect
trust and confidence, that he was, somehow, without any
concerted plans of action, to be sure, but still, somehow,
kept in the back-ground.

His beautiful locks were thin and faded, but still dropt
about his eyes now and then, faintly intimating the old
grace; and his broadcloth had more shine about the elbows
and knees than it used to have, and everywhere, hanging
like a dead weight upon his arm, was Margaret, listless and
limp as a rag. Her cheeks had lost their roses, and her

eyes all their merry sparkle — she had two children hanging
on her skirts — robust, rollicking, importunate and
unmanageable; and, in common with her children, she addressed
her husband as father. When she talked, it was
chiefly of the baby left at home in the cradle, or of that
other girl, buried now these five years. You would hardly
have recognized the bishop's son and Margaret, for the
same persons they were ten years ago; not so much for
the youth of life that was gone, as for the youth of heart
that was gone. Only once did something of the old brightness
come back to the cheeks of both, and that was when
the name of Bishop Dale was mentioned.

In the old-fashioned parlor of one of the elders, when the
evening's services were concluded, our special acquaintances,
together with a good many strangers, were assembled
for a little chat and social relaxation.

There was Mr. Hoops, all shaven and shorn, and otherwise
fresh as a bridegroom — the snowy whiteness of his
linen, and the neat little patch at his elbow, attesting the
careful hand of the wife at home — at home, as she always
was.

“No, she didn't come,” says Mr. Hoops, to one who
enquired for her — “She wanted to, bad enough, but the
fact is, orders was a comin' in for bonnets, and caps, and
things, and we couldn't both leave wery well.”

Then the sister to whom this was said repeated it to another,
and the two women shook their heads mournfully,
sighing, “poor Miss Goke!” for the milliner had always
been called Miss Goke, in spite of the Mrs. P. G. Hoops, on
the sign.

There was Mrs. Allprice, foolish, affected, slovenly and
pious, talking a great deal about her lovely daughter Margaret,
and her excellent son John Hamlyn, and boasting of
the unexampled felicity of their married life.

Nothing, indeed, could exceed the devotion of John to
Margaret, unless it were that of the Doctor for herself —
and really she was almost ashamed of the fondness of her
husband sometimes. She had lectured him so that he did
behave a little better before folks!

“He couldn't come to the meeting without me,” she
says, “for he can't bear me out of his sight for a moment —
dear Prosper!” Then she ran across the room to him, and

twitching his sleeve, for he was talking with a younger and
handsomer woman, told him in a whisper that she did wish
for mercy's sake he would remember once in a while, that
he had a wife still living in the world.

“I am not in danger of forgetting it,” says the Doctor,
and then he renewed his conversation with the handsome
young woman, with as lively an interest as ever. He
seemed, in truth, to have borne the wear and tear of the
marital teasing pretty bravely — his hair had fallen off to a
thin friz, it must be owned, and the little tuft of beard under his
double chin was the color of linen, when it is a little over-blued;
but his cheeks stood out with fatness, and his body
had gained in rotundity — gained so much indeed, that
his legs seemed to have lost in a corresponding degree. So
that when he waddled about, he looked a good deal as a
fish might look, if it were attempting to walk on its tail.
He was still professional as ever in his manner and conversation,
and had come to the conference amply provided
with calomel for gratuitous distribution, so that every sickly
brother with whom he came in contact, parted from him
with a shining tin box of blue pills in his hand.

Mrs. Whiteflock was the centre of an admiring circle
still, but how much less conspicuous and aggressive than
she used to be. She wore a cap over her smooth hair,
growing gray now, and in the place of the old finery, decent
and sober mourning. She was a little stouter than she
used to be, and her brow was not quite so smooth, but her
face had gained in sweetness of expression, more than it
had lost by time. When she went and came, she was attended
by a tall, large-eyed, and pale-cheeked young man,
whose unobtrusive and gentle manners won the good will
of all he met, and that was Peter, home from college for the
vacation.

All at once the murmur and stir pervading the different
groups into which the assembly had broken itself, subsided.
One of the circuit riders from the west, was talking of
Samuel Dale, our young bishop, he called him. “He
ought to have had a fortune by rights,” he was saying;
“and to have been as rich in worldly things as he is in
spiritual, but I suppose you all know how that worthless
relative of his — one Mr. Gayfeather, cheated him out of
his lawful inheritance; contriving by one pretence and

another, to get the legacy into his own hands, and to keep
it there.

“The Bishop never speaks of it,” said the stranger,
“unless he is forced to, and then he makes as if his loss
had been all a gain. `I have been saved from vexation
and care,' he will say; `perhaps from temptation.”' It
was at this point that the brightness came into the cheeks
of John and Margaret Lightwait.

After this, a good many incidents and anecdotes were
told of the young Bishop; of the hardships he had undergone
in his early career as a circuit rider in the west; of
the good turns he had done to strangers whom he had met
by chance in the wilderness, and of the wonderful power and
efficacy of his preaching.

In one place, twenty sinners who had come to scoff, it
was said, had fallen down, smitten by the first tones of his
voice, and had lain before him as dead men, for hours, rising
at last to confess their wickedness, and to pray to be
prayed for. And in another place, it was told how that an
old and hardened man, who had begun to cry out against
him with all profanity, and oaths, had been suddenly bereft of
speech, and that when utterance was restored, he had finished
the sentence begun in wrath and denunciation, with
shouting praises and glory to God.

One person had seen him, where he had encamped for the
night in the thick woods, far from human habitation, spelling
his way through his Greek Testament, with all the
eager enthusiasm of a school-boy — “for he is not among
those,” said the narrator; “who believe that ignorance is
wiser than knowledge.”

“He stayed with me once nearly a week,” said an old settler,
whose hands were nearly as brown as his coat, “and
I never knew it was him till long after he was gone. It
was a stormy time in November; the creeks and rivers up
uncommonly, and the roads a'most impassable; well, he
rode up one night, all frozen over with sleet-like armor,
for the wind had suddenly shifted, and the rain had turned
to snow, and asked my wife — for I was in the barn at the
time — if she could accommodate a traveller all night, or
maybe till the river got fordable, for it was raging and roaring,
and tearing up and crushing down trees as it went,
till you could hear the noise of it for miles and miles. No

matter about a bed, he said, he could sleep on the floor before
the fire, and be very comfortable.

“Well, he stayed nigh a week, I reckon, before the river
fell, and all the time he entertained us, instead of us him.
Mornings and evenings he would go out with me and feed
the cattle, and many a time I've seen him put his arm
around their necks, and look into their great eyes, a'most
as if they was fellar creturs — he has got such a kind heart,
it appears like it takes in everything. When the fire went
down, he would mend it, and then he would sit with a child
on either knee, and tell them stories of the wild beasts that
had crossed his path, as he was riding alone through the wilderness,
or of the prairie fire that had run after him, licking
the air with its red tongues, and trampling the dry grass
with its flaming feet. But oftenest he would read to the
old wife, as she spun, about the green fields and shining
flowers on beyond the river that we all dread so much.
sometimes he would sing hymn after hymn, of nights,
when all was still, making the woods tremble with echoes;
for there was a power in his voice to wake a spirit in dead
things, — so the week went like a day, my wife said, and
the children cried when he put his hand on their heads at
parting — but, bless you, what was our surprise to learn, as
we did long afterwards, that we had entertained our
Bishop.”

“That is just like Samuel!” cries Mrs. Whiteflock, “I
knew nothing could spoil him!”

“Nothing,” said Father Goodman, now a reverend old
man, “unless his pretty wife shall do what all the rest has
failed to do.”

“Wife!” cried six or eight women, all at once. “Bishop
Dale isn't married?”

Then it came out that the reverend father had married
the young Bishop on his way to that very conference.

And after all the exclamations of wonder and surprise,
the old man was set upon to tell about her. How did she
look? how old was she, and oh, of all things, was she really
pretty!

“Pretty as a rose bud!” answered the old man, with
all a young man's enthusiasm, “but I can't tell you what
she wore, nor how old she is. I only know that when I
took her hand, I felt suffused as with the sweetness of some

lovely flower, and that her smile warmed me like sunshine.
Yes, one thing more I do remember now, her hair would
not stay in her little Methodist bonnet of white satin, there
was such a great golden cloud of it, but got out and tumbled
about her neck and shoulders, and half hid her modest
eyes.”

“Perhaps the bright tresses blinded your eyes too, Father
Goodman!” said one of the women with a little laugh at
the wild extravagance of her suggestion.

“They might have done so, and have entangled my heart
into the bargain,” he replied, in no wise disconcerted, for
upon occasion he could be gay as well as grave; “if I had
had but fifty years less on my shoulders, and our handsome
young Bishop out of the way!”

There was a general stir when Father Goodman said this.
He saw it and interpreting it, perhaps, in an adverse sense,
at once stood up, and coming out in sight of all, said; “I
am not mad, O, men and brethren, but speak the words of
truth and soberness. I am an old gray-beard, to be sure,
but my heart, thank God, is as young as the youngest of
you all! And this youth of heart and soul, my friends, and
I speak it not irreverently, is to my mind one of the strongest
proofs of our immortality, this side of revelation. The
flower grows brighter and brighter, and sweeter and
sweeter, till it comes to full perfection; so does the fruit,
and why not then, the soul of man; so large in its capacity,
so infinite in its aspirations and its dreams, which
are but the shadowy intimations of its possibilities, as I
believe, and as I know, for faith is knowledge. Why not,
I say, the soul of man, that shall not, it may be, come to
full perfection till more of the ages of eternity shall have
passed over it, than we are at present able even to conceive.

“Yes, my brethren and sisters, my heart is as much alive
to beauty, and I am not ashamed to say it, as it was half a
century ago. Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever
things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever
things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if
there be any praise, I hold it to be virtue and praise to
think of these things, more especially when they appeal to
our loyalty through the character and life of that great
company of good women, who apart from the world's

recognition and the admiration of men's eyes, make only
this noiseless appeal.

“Whatever the pride and vanity of man may almost, or
quite persuade him to believe, woman is, after all, the
central figure and the central power of this lower world.
Our rougher hands hew and shape, or hew and seem to
shape, but hers is the informing soul — the life and the
spirit of the life.

“It is not the ground-work of dry dust, nor the blowing
and beating of the wind that rounds the daisy's perfect face
and makes it to send the very airs of heaven away from it
sweeter than they came, not these so much, nor half so
much, as the soft sunbeam, and the little drop of dew.

“I have been in the rudest homes, — I might almost say
huts, of the prairies and the woods, and I have seen women
that had never trodden any carpet but the carpet of the
grass and the flowers of the grass, and who had never worn
silken garments, nor dyed garments, nor any garments save
from the looms at which they themselves had wrought, who
yet ruled their houses and held their children with sovereign
grace, and who had about them a finer royalty than any of
your fading purples. I have been ministered to by hands
that never felt a jewel, and that were adorned only by the
signs of honest toil, and felt myself sumptuously entertained,
for I was entertained with better things than dyed
wool, or spun silk, or curiously carved metal. There are
to-night, and all nights, feeding their lonely fires, spinning
by their humble wheels, or tending their blessed cradles,
women who make poverty riches, solitude society, the narrow
enclosures of their cabin walls like the chambers of
palaces, and who find in the serving of others the sweetest
service to themselves.

“I thank God that I know these royal women, queens,
and the daughters of queens, when I see them; ay, and I
thank God that I love them too, with a love of which there
is no need to be ashamed. I thank God that so many of
them have chosen the good part that shall not be taken
away from them, for our divine Lord and Master, about
whose cross they lingered longest, and to whose tomb they
came earliest, will not, of a surety, forget them in that
great day when he numbers up his jewels. Amen.”