The rest of the sentence was lost in the terrific series of sneezes from Duff Salter, who had taken too big a pinch of snuff and forgot himself, so as to nearly lift the roof off the little old brick church with his deeply accentuated, "Jer-i-cho-whoe!" Even old Silas Van de Lear looked over the top of the pulpit and smiled, but, luckily, Duff Salter could hardly hear his own sneezes. As they left the church Agnes put down her veil, and trembled under the stare of a hundred investigating critics. When they were in the street, Podge Byerly remarked: "Oh! that we had a man to resent such meanness as that. I think that those who address God with slant arrows to wound others, as is often done at prayer-meeting, will stand in perdition beside the writers of anonymous letters." "They are driving me to the last point," said Agnes. "I can go to church no more. When will they get between me and heaven? Yet the Lord's will be done." CHAPTER V. THE GHOST. Spring broke on the snug little suburb, and buds and birds fulfilled their appointments on the boughs of willows, ailanthuses, lindens, and maples. Some peach-trees in the back yard of the Zane House hastened to put on their pink scarves and bonnets, and the boys said that an old sucker of Penn's Treaty Elm down in a ship-yard was fresh and blithsome as a second wife. In the hearts and views of living people, too, spring brought a budding of youthfulness and a gush of sap. Duff Salter acknowledged it as he looked in Podge Byerly's blue eyes and felt her hands as they wrapped his scarf around him, or buttoned his gloves. Whispering, and without the tablets this time, he articulated: "Happy for you, Mischief, that I am not young as these trees!" "We'll have you set out!" screamed Podge, "like a piece of hale old willow, and you'll grow again!" Duff Salter frequently walked almost to her school with Podge Byerly, which was far down in the old city. They seldom took the general cut through Maiden and Laurel Streets to Second, but kept down the river bank by Beach Street, to see the ship-yards and hear the pounding of rivets and the merry adzes ringing, and see youngsters and old women gathering chips, while the sails on the broad river came up on wind and tide as if to shatter the pier-heads ere they bounded off. In the afternoons Duff Salter sometimes called on Rev. Silas Van de Lear, who had great expectations that Duff would build them a much-required new church, with the highest spire in Kensington. "Here, Brother Salter, is an historic spot," wrote the good old man. "I shouldn't object to a spire on my church, with the figure of William Penn on the summit. Friend William and his sons always did well by our sect." "Is it an established fact that he treated with the Indians in Kensington?" asked Duff Salter, on his ivory tablets.