The respectability of the town was out in force. The richest fish firms, the largest ship-owners, and the oldest families shed the little light of local glory upon the occasion. Most of them, in fact, were members of the parish. Windover had what an irreverent outsider had termed her codocracy. The examination--to be followed that evening by the ordination--of the new minister was an affair of note. Windover is not the only town on the map where the social leaders are fond of patronizing whatever ecclesiastical interests are dependent on the generosity of their pockets and the importance of their names. Nothing tends to the growth of a religious sect so much as the belief that the individual is important to it. Upon the platform, decorated by the Ladies’ Aid Society with taste, piety, and goldenrod, sat the Council called to examine and to ordain Emanuel Bayard to the ministry of Christ. These were venerable men; they drove in from the surrounding parishes in their buggies, or took the trains from remoter towns. A few city names had responded; one or two of them were eminent. The columns of the “Windover Topsail” had these already set up in display type, and the reporters in the galleries dashed them off on yellow slips of paper. As the minister-elect, panting with his haste, ran up the steps and into the church, the first thing that he perceived was the eye of one of his Cesarea Professors fastened sternly upon him. It gave him the feeling of a naughty little boy who was late to school. This guilty sensation was not lessened by a vision of the back of his uncle’s bald head in an eminent seat among the lay delegates, and by the sight of the jeweled Swiss repeater, familiar to his infancy, too visibly suspended from Mr. Hermon Worcester’s hand. The church clock (wearing for the occasion a wreath of purple asters, which had received an unfortunate lurch to one side, and gave that pious timepiece a tipsy air) charitably maintained that Bayard was but seven minutes late. The impatience of the Council and the anxiety of the audience seemed to aver that an hour would not cover, nor eternity pardon, the young man’s delay. He dropped his valise into the hand of the sexton, and strode up the broad aisle. The dust of the street fight still showed upon his fashionable clothes. His cheeks were flushed with his fine color. His disordered hair clung to his white forehead in curls that the straitest sect of the Pharisees could not have straightened. Every woman in the audience noticed this, and liked him the better for it. But the Council was composed of straight-haired men. Somebody beckoned him into the minister’s room to repair damages: and as he crossed the platform to do so, Bayard stooped and exchanged a few whispered words with the moderator. The wrinkled face of that gentleman changed visibly. He rose at once and said:--